Bill Riley played for a pair of NHL expansion teams in the 1970s: the Washington Capitals and Winnipeg Jets.Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame/Supplied
Bill Riley endured racial taunts from fans, rivals and even teammates to become the third Black player to skate in the National Hockey League.
Mr. Riley, who has died at 75, forged a modest NHL career as the highlight of a dozen seasons as a journeyman professional.
The 5-foot-11, 195-pound forward compensated for a choppy skating stride by being a tireless forechecker. Known for a hard shot and a willingness to engage in fisticuffs when warranted, Mr. Riley often served as a team captain in the minors, a sign of the respect management and teammates held for him.
Throughout his hockey career, he was subject to offensive racial remarks, sometimes even in his own dressing room.
“My mother told me a long time ago, ‘You’re going to run into those things, and it’s better to just walk away from it,’” he told an American sportswriter in 1984. “It’s usually just some guy sloshed up on cheap beer. The people who yell those things don’t realize it, but their own friends don’t even look up to them.”
He was the target of several egregious incidents, including when a watermelon was thrown on the ice in Toledo, Ohio. Other times, rival fans littered the ice with pieces of fried chicken. (Raised in Atlantic Canada and unfamiliar with racist American tropes, Mr. Riley had to ask a Black American the meaning behind the act.) Fans on road trips called him a shoeshine boy, and arena organists played such songs as Shortnin’ Bread when he took to the ice.
In a notorious event in his home province of Nova Scotia, opposing coach John Brophy precipitated a bench-clearing brawl in an exhibition game after using a vile slur during an expletive-filled tirade.
Two years later, when the player successfully sought a spot on Mr. Brophy’s roster, he joked, “That was just Brophy’s way of telling me he wanted me on his hockey club.”
James William Riley was born on Sept. 20, 1950, in Amherst, N.S. He was the first of five children – four boys, one girl – born to the former Gladys Harper and James Birthon Riley. His mother was employed as a domestic worker and, later, in tourism, while his father owned a landscaping and sanitation business after service in the Canadian Forces, where he had success as a boxer.
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The boy spent winters on a frozen plot in the family backyard practising his shot by firing pucks at the rear porch, he told author Chris Cochrane for his 2011 book Inside the Game. Every spring, his father dutifully replaced missing and damaged boards.
He played Junior B hockey for the hometown Amherst Ramblers, leading the league in assists one season.
Undrafted as a junior player and needing to earn a living, Mr. Riley moved his young family to a remote British Columbia town to work as a welder at an Alcan aluminum smelter.
At age 21, still itching to play hockey, he suited up for the Kitimat Wellspar Loggers, a team in an oddball amateur league that included working lumberjacks and industrial tradesmen, as well as teenagers as young as 15 playing for isolated working-class communities. The newcomer was a scoring sensation with the Loggers and, later, the Eagles, winning the scoring title and most valuable player award in the Pacific Northwest Hockey League in all three of his full seasons. He scored an astonishing 74 goals in just 36 games in his final campaign.
He made his NHL debut with the expansion Washington Capitals just eight months later, one of the most extraordinary trajectories in league history.
His play at centre for Kitimat caught the attention of a scout. Mr. Riley, a self-described “hillbilly from Amherst,” was invited to the Capitals’ inaugural training camp in London, Ont., where he became a favourite of Tom McVie, coach of the Dayton Gems, a farm team in Ohio.
Mr. McVie teased that if he made the team he would have to sit at the back of the bus.
“If I make the team,” Mr. Riley replied, “I’ll drive the bus.”
The Gems’ captain nicknamed the player “Hershey.”
“A lot of times,” Mr. Riley told Mr. Cochrane, the author, “you were in the dressing room and you had to pretend you didn’t hear what you just heard.”
Converted to right wing, Mr. Riley soon earned a reputation with the Gems as a fierce competitor and a capable pugilist.
Riley was one of the first players to wear No. 8 for the Capitals, preceding Alex Ovechkin.Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame/Supplied
He earned a one-game call-up to the parent Capitals for a home game against the roughhouse Philadelphia Flyers on Dec. 26, 1974. The game is notable not for the score – a predictable 4-1 Flyers victory – but for the presence of two Black players in an NHL game. Left winger Mike Marson of Toronto had become the second Black player in league history at the start of the season, following in the trailblazing path of Willie O’Ree 13 seasons after he had last played in the NHL.
In his first two seasons in Dayton, Mr. Riley compiled 580 penalty minutes, which is just one period short of having spent 10 complete games in the penalty box.
With Mr. McVie having been hired as coach by the Capitals, Mr. Riley got more ice time with the parent club, though he bounced back and forth to the minors. He skated in 43 games for the Capitals in 1976-77, scoring 13 goals, and added another 13 goals in 57 games the following season. He was especially effective in the corners at winning the puck or tying up opponents.
In a game against Buffalo, defenceman Jim Schoenfeld lost his balance while trying to deliver a bodycheck at the blueline. He slid into the forward’s left ankle with a skate blade. Mr. Riley finished the period and was untying his skates in the dressing room in anticipation of having cigar-smoking trainer Ray (Gump) Embro look at what he suspected was a deep bruise.
“There was blood all over the boot and the socks were soaked,” Mr. Riley said after the game. “The gash was so bad I couldn’t see the beginning or end of it. The blood was thick red, so I knew it was serious.”
He needed 15 stitches and a cast, as well as several weeks of recuperation to heal a cut tendon.
The Capitals left Mr. Riley unprotected in the 1979 NHL expansion draft. The Winnipeg Jets selected him with their 15th pick, and he was reunited with coach McVie. Unfortunately for Mr. Riley, Winnipeg general manager John Ferguson had drafted younger tough guy Jimmy Mann, another right winger who led the NHL in penalty minutes that season. Mr. Riley only got to skate in 14 games, spending the rest of the season in the minors.
In 139 NHL games, he scored 31 goals with 30 assists. He also was assessed 320 penalty minutes. Capitals teammates voted him their rookie of the year for 1976-77, during which he led the woeful club with a plus-4 goal differential.
Riley dropped the gloves with feared enforcers, including the Philadelphia Flyers' Dave Schultz.RUSTY KENNEDY/The Associated Press
Mr. Riley fought such notable sluggers as Tiger Williams, Dave (The Hammer) Schultz and Bob Gassoff, a troubled St. Louis Blues defenceman whom he accused of uttering racial slurs.
Mr. Riley enjoyed six solid seasons in the minor American Hockey League with the Hershey Bears, Moncton Alpines, Nova Scotia Voyageurs and New Brunswick Hawks, winning a Calder Cup championship with the Moncton-based Hawks in 1982.
He retired as a player in 1984, working in promotions and as director of sales for the Moncton Golden Flames.
After time in the front office, he returned to the ice as a playing coach with the senior St. John’s Capitals, taking the club from last place to first and from “400 fans to 4,000,” he claimed, a bit of hyperbole as the Caps attracted about 1,200 customers per game before he arrived.
The Caps won the Herder Memorial Trophy as Newfoundland Senior Hockey League champions in 1987 before losing in the finals in the subsequent two seasons.
“I could have been the mayor, for sure,” he once joked, “and maybe even the premier of Newfoundland, I was that popular.”
In 1989, he was a late addition to the roster of the Port-Aux-Basques Mariners in their successful bid for a Hardy Cup national senior championship.
Eager to become an NHL coach, he guided his old hometown team, the junior Ramblers, for several seasons before serving as coach and director of hockey operations for the Moncton Wildcats of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. He often expressed frustration in interviews about the lack of opportunity to achieve his ambition.
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In 1978, Mr. Riley won a suit for breach of contract when an owner reneged on a promise to sell a summer cottage. The hockey player alleged the sale fell through because the owner was pressured by neighbours not to sell to a Black family. Newspapers reported there were no Black cottage owners among the 14,000 summer residents of the popular Amherst Shore area along Northumberland Strait.
A Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge ordered the sale to go through at the previously agreed price of $25,500, plus one year’s property taxes. He also awarded $350 in general damages plus costs.
Mr. Riley’s trailblazing role as the first Black Nova Scotian to play in the NHL earned several honours, including induction into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame in 1998, in the Multi-Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame in Oakland, Calif., in 2019 and the Moncton Sports Wall of Fame in 2025. Hockey Nova Scotia created an award and scholarship in his name four years ago.
Mr. Riley died in his childhood home in Amherst on March 29 three years after receiving a diagnosis of cancer. He leaves Helena Waye, his wife of 23 years, as well as a son, two daughters, three brothers, a sister and eight grandchildren. He also leaves his mother.
He was predeceased by his father, who died in 2019, aged 91, and by a son, Billy Riley Jr., known as Little Billy, who died in 2011, aged 35.
For much of his NHL career, he wore sweater No. 8 for the Capitals, a uniform number later worn by the league’s all-time goal scorer.
“I left a lot of goals in that sweater for Alex Ovechkin,” Mr. Riley liked to joke.
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