Herb Carnegie was a fixture at a monthly NHL old-timers luncheon in Toronto even though ne never played a minute in the League.
“We all had a chance to join in and Herbie had the same chance as the rest of us to be part of it,” said Pete Conacher, an NHL forward from 1951-58. “What happened to Herbie, like in hockey, didn’t necessarily happen at the old-timers luncheon, that’s for sure.”
Carnegie was an electric, high-scoring center from the 1930s into the 1950s who dreamed of playing in the NHL but was held back because of race.
Carnegie, regarded by many as the best Black player to never reach the NHL, will finally take his place among many of the League’s greats Monday when he is posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Builders category.
“When Jackie Robinson was breaking racial barriers in baseball, that was not happening in our sport,” Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee chairman Mike Gartner told TSN in June after announcing Carnegie’s election. “When you have someone like Herb Carnegie, who because of the color of his skin was really not allowed to play in our league because of just the way it was at that time, that’s a problem. We’re looking at it and we’re looking at the type of legacy that he has left.”
Carnegie’s induction culminates a decades-long effort by family, hockey historians, current and former players, and fans to get the man who blazed a trail as a player, innovator and philanthropist into the Hall.
“My father clearly made history and tried to pursue a career that was traditionally not considered for Black men, and he did well,” said his daughter, Bernice. “He did encounter setbacks, for sure, and challenges. But what I love so much about my dad is how he navigated around the difficulties and kept coming up a winner in life.”
Carnegie, who died March 9, 2012, at the age of 92, will become the Hall’s fifth Black inductee, joining Grant Fuhr (2003), Angela James (2010), Willie O’Ree (2018) and Jarome Iginla (2020).
O’Ree, who became the NHL’s first Black player when he made his debut with the Boston Bruins against the Montreal Canadiens at the Montreal Forum on Jan. 18, 1958, has said that Carnegie should have entered the League before him.
“Herb Carnegie was an excellent hockey player, but more importantly, he was a beautiful human being,” O’Ree said.
The son of Jamaican immigrants to Canada, Carnegie played in the Quebec Provincial Hockey League, the Quebec Senior Hockey League and the Ontario Hockey Association Senior A League from 1944-54. He played for the Quebec Aces of the QSHL from 1949-53, where he mentored young teammate Jean Beliveau, a future Montreal Canadiens great and 1972 Hall of Fame inductee.
Carnegie was part of the “Black Aces,” professional hockey’s first all-Black line, which also featured his brother, Ossie, and Manny McIntyre, with the Timmins Buffalo Ankerites in 1941.
He won two scoring titles and three most valuable player awards in the QPHL from 1944-48. He competed on four Allan Cup teams in the 1940s and helped Quebec win the Alexander Cup as Canadian semipro champions in 1952.
Beliveau, in his autobiography, “Jean Beliveau: My Life in Hockey,” wrote that Carnegie had NHL-level skills but that he had one drawback: He was Black.
“It’s my belief that Herbie was excluded from the NHL because of his color,” Beliveau wrote in the book co-authored by Chris Goyens and Allan Turowetz. “He certainly had the talent, and was very popular with the fans, who would reward his great playmaking with prolonged standing ovations, both at home and on the road.”
NHL teams were aware of Carnegie’s talent. Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe reportedly said that he would “give any man $10,000 who can turn Herb Carnegie white” after seeing him play with the Toronto Junior Rangers in 1938.
The closest Carnegie came to the NHL was when the New York Rangers invited him to training camp in September 1948. He accepted the invite but rejected three contract offers, including the final one that would have had him play for the Rangers’ American Hockey League affiliate in New Haven, Connecticut.
Carnegie, who was 28 at the time with a wife and three children refused the offers because they were less than what he was earning playing in Quebec, his daughter said.
“They were promising, ‘Oh, well, you know you’ll be the first’ … but Dad said, ‘I can’t feed my family on headlines,'” Bernice Carnegie said. “I have to applaud my dad for his choices. He made the right choices for his family.”
Hockey historians and writers have debated whether Carnegie erred by declining the Rangers’ offer.
Cecil Harris, author of “Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Hockey,” said that he wished Carnegie had accepted the Rangers’ final offer because it mirrored the approach the Brooklyn Dodgers took that led to Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947. The Dodgers first assigned Robinson to a minor league team in Montreal before promoting him to Brooklyn.
“If players had agents back then, someone could have advised Herb Carnegie to see the bigger picture: You’re just one step from the NHL, there were only six teams, the Rangers were the worst of the six teams that season (18-31-11 in 1948-49),” said Harris, who interviewed Carnegie for his 2004 book. “So, if anything, the Rangers could have called him up and he would have been the Jackie Robinson of hockey. But it’s tricky because the Rangers also could have afforded to match whatever he was making in Canada and didn’t.”
Carnegie never got another shot at the NHL.
“The scars of that experience mark my soul to this day,” Carnegie wrote in his 1997 autobiography co-written with Bernice, “A Fly in a Pail of Milk: The Herb Carnegie Story.” “The Rangers camp was the end of my dream to play in the NHL.”
Carnegie retired as a player in 1954 and achieved as much success off the ice as he did on it. He started the Future Aces School, one of the first registered hockey academies in Canada.
He developed the Carnegie System, a patented magnetic hockey instruction board that was used by some NHL teams.
He created the Future Aces Creed, a 12-point philosophy to help mold youngsters into responsible citizens. He also became a successful financial adviser and a championship senior golfer.
He co-founded the Herbert H. Carnegie Future Aces Foundation in 1987 with his wife, Audrey, and Bernice, with a mission to inspire youth to be confident and pursue education excellence.
The nonprofit organization has awarded more than $900,000 in scholarships to children across Canada. But Carnegie provided more than money to the foundation. He gave people hope.
Mark DeMontis was a foundation scholarship recipient and a promising AAA hockey player in Toronto at age 17 when a rare eye condition called Leber hereditary optic neuropathy took his sight.
Carnegie, who lost his sight due to glaucoma in his later years, bonded with DeMontis and invited him to tell his story to school students and organizations. Inspired by Carnegie and the Future Aces Creed, DeMontis founded Courage Canada in 2009 and traveled more than 3,100 miles from Toronto to Vancouver on in-line skates to raise funds and support for blind hockey programming for youth.
In 2016, the organization evolved into Canadian Blind Hockey, which provides programs for blind and partially sighted children and adults that include youth teams, development camps and tournaments.
“I still remember Herb always looking at me saying, ‘Mark, no matter what happens, keep the spark burning, keep the fire inside of you burning,'” DeMontis said. “Inspiring is an understatement. He saved and changed my life.”
Carnegie became one of Canada’s most decorated citizens, enshrined in 13 halls of fame and invested in the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. A public school and a skating rink in the Toronto area bear his name.
Now he’s about to be enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“My grandfather was ahead of his time,” said Rane Carnegie, a grandson who mounted a petition drive advocating for Carnegie’s induction into the Hall that got more than 15,000 signatures.
“I am forever thankful, our family is forever thankful, and the countless amount of young people who came after my grandfather are forever thankful that he was able to lay out a blueprint and a foundation that we can all hope to follow and be so fortunate to capture even a small smidgen of what he was able to do throughout his life.”
Photos courtesy of Le Studio du hockey/Hockey Hall of Fame