What Herb Carnegie needed more than anything else during the prime years of his athletic life was a sponsor. He needed his own Branch Rickey. Rickey was the baseball visionary that, as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Negro League baseball star Jackie Robinson to a contract in October 1945. It was a business transaction done in an era of systemic racial oppression that changed the face of sports history.

During the same years Robinson augmented a reputation as a four-sport star at UCLA, Carnegie-also a man of a darker hue-excelled on hockey rinks, often in Canadian mining towns, usually on the periphery of the spotlight.

Some who saw Carnegie perform in person-including Jean Beliveau and Frank Mahovlich, two of the greatest centres in hockey history-marvelled at his multi-faceted skills and considered him among the finest players of his time. Unfortunately for Carnegie, he would never perform on his sport's premier stage, the NHL. And for that, the gatekeepers of the NHL must bear most of the blame-and Carnegie himself must bear at least some.

An NHL hopeful in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, Carnegie predated the widespread media coverage now devoted to hockey. Hence, his contributions to the sport received inadequate exposure then and are a source of debate now. The issue of whether his credentials are worthy of induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame has become a political football, and Carnegie's side is trailing by a considerable margin on the scoreboard.

"I wish somebody from the Hall of Fame would have the decency to phone me and sit down with me and say, 'Herb, this is the problem. This is why it hasn't happened,'" he said, struggling to mask the pain. An immensely proud man, he lives in northern Toronto, less than one hour's drive from the Hall of Fame, but perhaps light years away from hockey's shrine philosophically.

Had his pursuit of an NHL career not been derailed by a league-wide policy of exclusion that may have been given public voice in 1938 by Conn Smythe, the powerful and influential owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Carnegie likely would have become the NHL's first black player. The history-making ascension would have occurred more than a decade before Willie O'Ree broke the league's colour barrier in 1958. Carnegie's debut in hockey's major league also could have occurred during the 1948-49 season, or shortly thereafter, were it not for his own bold, but ultimately self-defeating, decision-a decision that may have done irreparable harm to his candidacy for the Hall of Fame.

Even today, as an octogenarian, Carnegie could use a sponsor. He would welcome the opportunity to face his detractors on the Hall of Fame's selection committee, although he can no longer see them. Robbed of his sight a dozen years ago by glaucoma, he is cared for today by Audrey Carnegie, his wife of sixty-three years. But do not pity Herb Carnegie. Pity is the one thing he neither wants nor needs.

"I feel I've been blessed," says Carnegie, who turned eighty-four on November 8, 2003. "It would be nice to be in the Hockey Hall of Fame, not only for myself but on behalf of my wife and my [four] children and all those who have helped me over the years. But it is something that is out of my hands. It has always been out of my hands. So I've never felt that I should not go on living my life just because I haven't been accepted by the Hockey Hall of Fame."

A helping hand from someone high above the ice, in a seat of power and influence, is what Carnegie truly needed to properly showcase his skills during his best years in hockey. But he chose to devote his life to a sport that at the time had no visionary. A Branch Rickey who defied the social and racial mores of his time and handed a baseball contract to a black man for the most sensible of reasons-it would make his team better-probably would have been drummed out of hockey. For hockey had no man with the courage to see past the darkness of racial discrimination and give all of the sport's gifted players during most of the first half of the twentieth century an opportunity to perform in the NHL.

"Let's face it, Herbie Carnegie was one helluva hockey player," wrote one sportswriter who watched him many times. "He could have been a star in the six-team NHL were it not for the colour bars that kept all black athletes out of all major sports at the time."

Had it not been so important to the fathers of hockey for so long to keep the NHL white, Carnegie almost assuredly would have become the Jackie Robinson of his sport. While he starred in semi-pro leagues from his late teens to his late twenties, he did not get a call from the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Bruins or New York Rangers.

Instead, Carnegie achieved a measure of popularity in lesser leagues while teaming with his older brother, Ossie, and Manny McIntyre to form a potent all-black line known from 1941 through 1949 by various nicknames, including The Black Aces. Herb wore No. 7, Ossie No. 10 and Manny No. 11.
Herb Carnegie, the centre and conductor of the trio, stood at 5-foot-8 and weighed 165 pounds. "My thrill was in setting plays," he said. "To me, the game is a beautiful thing when you can set up a winger. That's an art."

He was an unusually handsome man in his younger days, with bronze skin, thin-slit brown eyes, a pencil-thin mustache and black hair chemically straightened into the conk style made famous by bandleader Cab Calloway. His appearance might have served him well as a leading man or action hero in the "race" movies of the era, such as 1939's The Bronze Buckaroo.

Although Carnegie would be considered woefully undersized for his on-ice position today, smallish centres were not an unusual sight in 1940s hockey. However, smallish black centres were highly unusual. An all-black line was unprecedented. Ossie Carnegie, the right wing, possessed a crackling slapshot. McIntyre, the left wing, provided the muscle. If one of the trio was going to answer a racial slur from an opponent or spectator with his fists, it would likely be McIntyre.

And there was no shortage of racial slurs directed toward The Black Aces. Audrey Redmon Carnegie, the light-skinned daughter of transplanted Chicago natives, sat in the stands on many occasions and heard her husband Herb called "nigger" and sundry other words of hate by spectators seated nearby, people who did not realize she was black and married to the best player on the ice. She managed to hold her tongue while in the company of haters, because that is how blacks generally dealt with hate in that era.

The Carnegie brothers had been a popular duo in the mines league (hockey teams playing in mining towns) beginning in 1941 with the Buffalo Ankerites, a team owned by a group of Buffalo-based businessmen, and whose games were played in Canada. Hockey players, even NHL players, made so little money in that era that the brothers also worked as machine operators for the Ankerite Company. For a hockey player, a second job was necessary. If a player made $100 a week from hockey then he was doing quite well. The Carnegie brothers' financial status improved significantly when McIntyre joined the Ankerites. A native of Fredericton, New Brunswick, McIntyre correctly sensed the economic potential of an all-black line and successfully lobbied for his inclusion.

"They were good enough as a line to play in the American League, which was a level below the NHL," said Red Storey, a Hall of Fame referee who played against Herb Carnegie in junior hockey. "But Herbie was the leader. They couldn't have gone anywhere without Herb. He was good enough to play in the NHL. It was strictly colour, not talent, that kept him out."

While the all-black line racked up points and inspired applause throughout the semi-pro circuit, it inspired an assortment of colourful sobriquets from the sporting press: The Dark Destroyers, The Ink Spots, The Brown Bombers (a reference to heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis), The Dusky Speedsters. There was even one reference to the players' varying skin tones: 8-Ball, Snowball and Haile Selassie (the former emperor of Ethiopia). But the name the trio liked best was The Black Aces. By any name, the all-black line made a profound impression on Mahovlich, a Hall of Fame forward who first saw them in 1942.

"The black line was so amazing because of their great skills-the skating, the passing, the goal scoring," he said. "I was a centreman for many years. I might have envisioned myself going down the ice like Herb Carnegie. In my mind I said, 'I guess if I ever become a hockey player, I'm going to be playing against a lot of blacks.' However, that was the only time I ever saw three blacks on the same line."

Mahovlich would never see any of The Black Aces in an NHL game. Herb Carnegie, the most gifted of the trio and the finest black player of the pre-expansion era (before 1967), would never display his considerable skills as a puckhandler and playmaker in his sport's premier league. And many who watched him perform under dimmer lights and before lesser crowds in other venues believe hockey fans themselves were cheated for having missed him.

Said one fan of Canada's pastime: "I saw a lot of hockey when I was in Quebec in the old mines league. The Carnegie brothers, Ossie and Herbie, were there. They could have played in the NHL but they [the NHL] wouldn't let them in because they were coloured, which was awful."

In September 1948, however, the NHL pried open a door just wide enough to acknowledge Herb Carnegie. But instead of doing his utmost to kick the door down, heunwittingly closed it on himself.

With no advance word, a letter arrived at the Carnegie home one August morning in 1948 from the New York Rangers, inviting the twenty-eight-year-old Carnegie to report to the team's training camp in Saranac Lake, New York on September 14. Carnegie had not even been aware the NHL was paying attention to him. No NHL team had contacted him while he excelled as leader of The Black Aces line in the 1944-45 season for the oddly named Shawinigan Falls Cataracts for a salary of $75 a week in the semi-pro Quebec Provincial League (QPL), whose calibre of play was below that of the NHL and perhaps comparable to a professional minor league. Carnegie had not heard from the NHL after he scored five goals in one game against Cornwall that season. Nor had he heard from the major league after he and his black linemates moved on to the Sherbrooke Randies of the QPL for the next two seasons. Carnegie remembered The Black Aces combining for eighty-four goals and ninety-eight assists in 1945-46, and he remembered narrowly losing the scoring title to former Montreal Canadiens winger Tony Demers of the St. Hyacinthe team, 79-75. He remembered scoring a Gretzky-like 127 points in fifty-six games in the 1947-48 season with Sherbrooke. But he didn't know the NHL had taken notice.

The missive from the Rangers was a form letter sent to twenty Canadian amateur or semi-pro players inviting them to try out for berths on the NHL team's roster. The invitees would report to Saranac Lake and work out at an arena in nearby Lake Placid, under the scrutiny of coach and general manager Frank Boucher until the arrival of members of the Rangers and two of their minor-league clubs, the New Haven Ramblers of the American League and the New York Rovers of the Eastern League, for the official opening of training camp September 21.

The inclusion of Carnegie among the invitees was significant because up until 1945, each of the four major professional sports leagues in North America had excluded black talent. Various sports writers in the U.S., particularly those from the black press such as Wendell Smith of The Pittsburgh Courier and Sam Lacy of The Baltimore Afro-American, wrote forceful columns denouncing Major League Baseball's refusal to admit black players. Some players from the Negro Leagues, including Robinson, had been promised tryouts, but big-league officials and white players sometimes would not even bother to show up. Not until Robinson officially joined the Dodgers' organization on October 23, 1945 had any black baseball player signed with a big-league club. The National Basketball Association did not include blacks until 1950 when the New York Knicks signed Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, the Boston Celtics drafted Charles "Tarzan" Cooper and the Washington Capitals played Earl Lloyd in an October 31 game. Charles Follis was the first black professional football player, in the early 1900s, in a league that predated the National Football League. The NFL, however, tacitly banned black players from 1933 until 1946 when the league admitted Woody Strode and Kenny Washington so it could secure a lease to play games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

The signing of Robinson by Brooklyn and his extremely successful debut with the Dodgers undoubtedly emboldened a few other team executives in major pro leagues to give an opportunity to black athletes. Carnegie said he had followed Robinson's career during the 1940s and often wondered which of the two would be the first to break the colour barrier in his sport. However, the events at Rangers' camp in 1948 strongly suggest Carnegie had not followed Robinson's story closely enough.

In the first week of workouts at the Lake Placid arena, Carnegie matched his skills against players he considered inferior to those he faced regularly in the Quebec Provincial League. He had just won his second consecutive MVP award in the league and led Sherbrooke to the league championship. Carnegie remembers eagerly awaiting the September 21 arrival of Rangers stars such as Buddy O'Connor, the 1947-48 NHL MVP, and Edgar Laprade.

But as Carnegie wrote in his 1997 autobiography, A Fly in a Pail of Milk, he was called into an office during the first week of camp by minor-league coach Muzz Patrick and offered $2,700 a year to sign with the Rangers' organization and play for the team's lowest-level farm club in Tacoma, Washington. The $2,700 was far less than the $5,100 he had made in the 1947-48 season with Sherbrooke, so he turned the offer down. After practice the next day, Carnegie wrote, he was summoned by minor-league coach Lynn Patrick, Muzz Patrick's brother, and offered a $3,700 contract to sign with the organization and report to the Rangers' farm club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Again, he refused. The next day, he wrote, Rangers coach Phil Watson offered him $4,700 to sign and play for the team's top farm club, the New Haven Ramblers. He declined the offer while telling Watson he thought himself more than capable of earning a spot on the Rangers roster.

Carnegie's literary account contains one notable error: Frank Boucher was the Rangers coach and general manager at the time, not Phil Watson. Watson would not coach the Rangers until 1955. In 1948-49, Watson coached the New York Rovers, a team Carnegie would face that season in minor-league hockey. Boucher stepped down as Rangers coach on December 21, 1948, after the team got off to a poor start-six wins, eleven losses, six ties-and was replaced by Lynn Patrick. Boucher continued as general manager until 1955. When the 1948-49 training camp began, Lynn Patrick was the coach of New Haven. So why would Lynn Patrick be the one to offer Carnegie $3,700 to play for St. Paul? Carnegie does not recall. He said Muzz Patrick offered him $2,700 to play for Tacoma, and indeed Muzz Patrick coached Tacoma at the time. But why were the Rangers making such lowball offers to Carnegie in the first place? Surely they must have known he had made $5,100 the season before at Sherbrooke. Simply, the Rangers knew they could get away with it. The NHL had only six teams in 1948. There were only 126 jobs for hockey players in the premier league. No player had an agent, and an NHL players union would not exist until 1967. Hockey teams wielded a mighty hammer in 1948. And if Carnegie, just another nail in the board, truly wanted to fulfill what he had described as a lifelong dream to play in the NHL, then it would have behooved him to get the best deal he could, swallow hard and try to make the best of it. While he is deserving of credit for not jumping at either of the first two lowball offers, he seriously overplayed his hand by turning down the third.

Carnegie's stay at Rangers' camp lasted eleven days. After initially turning down the $4,700 offer to play for New Haven, he said he persuaded Rangers management to let him remain in camp for the second week so he could show his talent against real NHL players. He took the ice for four successive days against the Rangers, including centres O'Connor and Laprade and goalie Jim Henry. "I had proven myself beyond a shadow of a doubt," Carnegie said. "I had shown the Rangers I could play as well."
Perhaps he had. But the Rangers still had the hammer to dictate the terms of whatever relationship they would have with Carnegie, as they would with every other player in a league where only the owners had clout. The Rangers' relationship with Carnegie would be regrettably short. On his eleventh day in camp, he remembers meeting with Boucher, the coach and general manager. Again he was offered $4,700 to begin the 1948-49 season with the Rangers' top farm club in New Haven, just one notch belowthe NHL, just two hours away from Madison Square Garden if he needed to be promoted in a hurry. Again, he declined.

The final deal offered Carnegie by the Rangers was essentially the same deal the Brooklyn Dodgers had offered Robinson. The Rangers may well have looked to their New York baseball counterparts and used as a blueprint for their dealings with Carnegie the Dodgers' handling of Robinson. The baseball star's deal called for him to play the entire 1946 season for the Dodgers' top farm club, the Montreal Royals. He would not advance from the Negro Leagues directly to Major League Baseball. Robinson would spend a year in the minors, Rickey explained, so he could be sure Robinson could excel on the playing field and handle the inevitable racist slurs and various other indignities a black man would surely face as the only player of his colour in an organized league one notch below Major League Baseball. If all went well, Rickey said, Robinson would join the big leagues in 1947.

After Robinson accepted the terms of the deal and played his way into the majors, he indelibly etched his name in the annals of sports and world history. Baseball players had no agents or union representation at that time, either. There were no salary negotiations. A player took whatever money he was offered, or he left the room and looked for other work. So when Rickey told Robinson to start in Montreal-just to be sure-Robinson, already a star in black baseball, did not take offense to being asked to spend a year in the minor leagues. He took the deal, for it would benefit not only him but also the black players who would follow him. Indeed, by 1948, the year after Robinson carried the banner for blacks in Major League Baseball, three other blacks (Larry Doby, Roy Campanella and Satchel Paige) had joined him in the elite league.
While there was no black hockey league in the late 1940s, no on-ice equivalent of the Negro Leagues, there were a few other blacks who played hockey besides Herb Carnegie, such as his brother, Ossie, and Manny McIntyre, both of whom went on to play pro hockey in France. In Herb Carnegie's own words, Boucher wanted him to start in New Haven "just to be sure." The Rangers likely had a legitimate concern about how well Carnegie would play with linemates other than his brother and McIntyre who, in the opinion of Hall of Fame referee Storey, were not of NHL potential. A strong start by Carnegie in New Haven would have eliminated that concern. Boucher also said he would "make every effort" to promote Carnegie during the 1948-49 season. Had Carnegie taken the offer, he would have been on the cusp of an NHL career while making the ice somewhat more solid for other black hopefuls.

The major difference, then, between sports pioneers Robinson and Carnegie was this: Robinson took the deal and Carnegie did not.

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Carnegie, married and a father of three at the time (his fourth child was born in 1951), felt no need to take a $400 pay cut and play minor-league hockey in New Haven, when he could continue playing semi-pro hockey in Canada and be closer to his family. He returned to Sherbrooke, reuniting briefly with Ossie and McIntyre, then joined the Quebec Major Hockey League from 1949 to 1953, and the Ontario Senior Hockey Association for the 1953-54 season.
"He stayed in Canada because he had a better future here financially," said Storey, who lives in Montreal. "He could do better in the Quebec League financially than he could in the NHL."

In Carnegie's view, he proved to Rangers players in four days of drills and scrimmages that his skills were at least comparable to theirs. He also said the other players were truly surprised to see him leave camp. Only a few men who attended that camp fifty-five years ago are still alive. Don "Bones" Raleigh, a spindly 150-pound centre, was there. The seventy-seven-year-old said he saw Carnegie on the ice but remembers nothing specific about him. Laprade, a Hall of Fame centre, recalls being surprised that Carnegie left. But he remembers little about Carnegie the player.

"I can't recall if he was above average in any particular thing at all," said Laprade, who is eighty-four. "But I don't know why he didn't take that New Haven offer. Two things: he would have been one step from the Rangers or one step from another NHL club if the Rangers decided to trade him, and he could have been the first coloured player. I guess he made the decision not to go. That's his. Has he ever regretted it?"

A 1973 article in The Toronto Sun quotes Carnegie as saying, "I missed the NHL by the stroke of a pen. Frankie Boucher was coaching the New York Rangers in 1948 and he told me he thought I was a good player, but he wanted to be sure whether I could play in the NHL. So he suggested I sign and start playing in New Haven. I was twenty-nine [actually twenty-eight] at the time and I didn't feel like playing there. For in those days there were not too many thirty-year-old players in the NHL and I knew that if I didn't make it immediately, I wouldn't get another chance."

Carnegie said on April 10, 2003 that he did not recall expressing any regret about his decision. Asked if he would have signed with the Rangers organization if he had it to do over again, he said emphatically, "No. I don't even have to think twice about that. I'm at the end of my career and it's no time for me to be going to the minors to start a new career with teenagers and twenty-year-olds. I didn't think it would have made any kind of sense."

But in the late 1940s, an NHL team's top minor-league affiliate was not quite the kiddie corps Carnegie made it out to be. Remember, there were only six NHL franchises then, only 126 major-league jobs. The top minor-league teams had many players in their late twenties and early thirties trying to play their way into the NHL. And had Carnegie been promoted to the Rangers after turning twenty-nine during the 1948-49 season, he would not have been a greybeard by any means. He would have been five years younger than forward/defenseman Neil Colville, three years younger than O'Connor and defenseman Bill Moe, the same age as Laprade, winger Alex Kaleta and defenseman Wally Stanowski and one year older than goalie Chuck Rayner.

Furthermore, Detroit Red Wings centre Jim McFadden won the NHL Rookie of the Year award in the 1947-48 season-at age twenty-eight.
Incidentally, Robinson, born January 31, 1919, was a mere forty weeks older than Carnegie when he broke baseball's colour barrier and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. Robinson clearly had not considered himself too old to spend a year in the minors to play his way into the big leagues.
"Herb wouldn't have been the first guy to start off in the minors before getting to the NHL," Laprade said. "You don't just jump into the National Hockey League. You go to the minors, get experience, then maybe after two or three months or a year, they'd call him up."

Perhaps it would have taken Carnegie less than a month after reporting to the New Haven team to become the "Jackie Robinson of hockey." On October 8, 1948, six days before the Rangers' season-opening game against the Montreal Canadiens, O'Connor and Laprade-the team's two best centres-were among four players injured in an auto accident in Lacolle, Quebec, near the U.S.-Canadian border. "Buddy was driving. We got permission to take his car to New York and an old wagon full of apples pulled up in front of us and he hit it," Laprade said.

Broken ribs sidelined O'Connor for six weeks. Laprade played the Montreal game despite a broken nose and a concussion. Had Carnegie, a centre, been with New Haven at the time he could have been called up to the Rangers as a replacement. (That is how Willie O'Ree became the NHL's first black player in 1958. The Boston Bruins called him up from the minor leagues to replace an injured player.) Instead, New York made a pair of trades to replace the injured players.

"Don't you think the Rangers would have called me back if they had been serious about wanting me?" Carnegie asked. But he effectively answered his own question as he recalled his final conversation with Rangers management at training camp: "They told me that if I signed with the Rangers and went to New Haven I would make international headlines. I told them my family couldn't eat headlines. That was probably when the Rangers decided to forget about me."

The rest of the NHL forgot about him as well. He never got another call from the major league.

The Rangers probably could have done a better job of trying to convince Carnegie that he should start the 1948-49 season in New Haven. They did not have to, but they could have. The Rangers could have pointed out, and Carnegie does not recall them doing so, that the minimum NHL salary that season was $5,000, meaning if he had been promoted to the major-league club his pay would have been at least commensurate with his Sherbrooke salary. Further, it could have been bettered, had he been offered a salary more than one hundred dollars above the league minimum. And with an opportunity to cash in on new-found fame and status as the NHL's first and only black player, Carnegie could have generated even more money. Yes, the Rangers could have allowed Carnegie to start the season with the big club. But the Dodgers in 1946 didn't do that with Robinson, and by 1948 everybody could see how well Brooklyn's plan had worked. And yes, the Rangers could have summoned Carnegie from Sherbrooke after the injuries to O'Connor and Laprade.

But NHL teams had no obligation to satisfy Carnegie or any other player, only themselves. Carnegie, for his part, refused to be treated like just another nail in the board. If only he had had the leverage to match his intractability. He will be remembered as the best black player never to reach the NHL, partly because of the racism that circumscribed the lives of all blacks in North America during his athletic prime and partly because of an insistence on trying to dictate the terms under which he would sign with an NHL organization in 1948-a year in which hockey players, black or white, could not dictate anything to management.

"The Rangers at that time were not exactly a powerhouse; we finished in last place," said Emile Francis, a backup goalie in 1948-49. "You think Boucher was concerned about race? Heck, he was trying to win games. He would have played any player who could have helped us win games."

Francis' viewpoint is noteworthy, not merely because he's a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame after five decades as a goalie, coach and general manager, but because he sits on the Hall of Fame selection committee-a group called upon to consider Carnegie's candidacy in 2000. It certainly did not help Carnegie's chances to be elected as a player then, and will not help in the future, if he is regarded by at least one selection committee member as simply a career semi-pro. Asked if Carnegie had been a good enough player to get into the Hall of Fame, Francis said, "You'd have to play in a better category of hockey than that. That's not the NHL."

Larry Zeidel, a former NHL defenseman who played against Carnegie in the Quebec Senior League, said in a 1972 interview he believed money, not race, was a bigger factor in Carnegie's exclusion from the NHL. "Ossie and Herbie were making terrific money in the Quebec [Provincial] League and had side jobs which gave them more security," he said. "There was no reason to try for the NHL."

Herb Carnegie, whose brother Ossie died in 1991, disputed Zeidel's assertion and said it was a boyhood dream of his and Ossie's to play major-league hockey. Racism kept the Carnegie brothers out of the NHL, he said, which is precisely what their father told them would happen.

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The son of Jamaican immigrants, Herb Carnegie was born in Toronto and grew up playing hockey on the pond rinks in Willowdale, north of the city. Herb and Ossie Carnegie spent many hours on the pond developing a symmetry that would make them semi-pro stars years later. Herb, however, would become a master improviser. He could lift fans out of their seats with a feathery pinpoint pass, exquisite puckhandling or a brilliantly conceived play. He had the soft and quick hands required of a centre along with a penchant for creativity and keen instincts for the game.

"I was just amazed at the way he played; he was much superior to the others on the ice," said Mahovlich, a fifteen-time NHL All-Star. "I've known Herb pretty much my entire life, since the first hockey game I ever witnessed at the age of four way up in Northern Ontario ... in a little mining community called Timmins. My dad had taken me to a game in the mines league. Every mining town had a hockey team, and Herb was playing for the Buffalo Ankerites."

Carnegie's performances in the mines league have largely been lost to history. Accurate statistical records are hard to come by. Carnegie, who could have become "the Jackie Robinson of hockey," has instead become "the Josh Gibson of hockey," a kindred spirit of the often-overlooked slugging catcher who entered the Negro Leagues well before Robinson and found racism an impenetrable barrier to entering Major League Baseball.

From sun-up to sundown on many a winter's day, Herb and Ossie Carnegie cultivated their hockey skills on the pond and dreamed of displaying them in the NHL. That no black man had yet played in the major league was not lost on either boy. Ossie and Herb expected to be the first ones, in that order. But their father, George, could never envision the possibility. "You know they won't let any black boys into the National Hockey League," he said.

George Carnegie worked as a janitor and wife Adina as a homemaker and, being among the earliest Caribbean ŽmigrŽs, they were determined to see that their children had a better and richer life. Since others would be sure to tell Herb Carnegie he would never play in the NHL, his father wanted to be sure Herb would not neglect his studies or stunt his personal growth in pursuit of a dream that could be denied by forces and institutions more powerful than he.

Herb Carnegie's earliest remembrance of bigotry came at age four when neighbourhood children slurred him. He remembered responding to taunts of "nigger," "coon" and "Rastas" with his fists, which he considered a fitting response from a strong-minded Scorpio.

It seemed whenever Herb was not playing hockey, he was fighting for any modicum of respect he could extract from schoolmates and neighbours. As his confidence in being able to physically defend himself grew, so did his devotion to and proficiency in hockey. He also took a liking to baseball and golf. In the twilight of his athletic life he would win the Canadian Senior Golf championship in 1977 and '78.

In high school hockey, Carnegie earned the nickname "Swivel Hips" because of his elusiveness on the ice. He also heard other names on the ice. He recalls a game attended by several thousands in which one megaphone-voiced spectator repeatedly yelled, "Get the black bastard!" However, a stunned Carnegie heeded the advice of a coach who said the most effective response to bigotry was to score goals. Carnegie filled the net with pucks and garnered his share of laudatory clippings from Toronto-area newspapers. His father hoped he woul