Congratulations to Quinton Byfield for being the first overall pick Saturday in the Ontario Hockey League’s Priority Selection draft.
The 15-year-old center from Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, was chosen by the Sudbury Wolves after he put up monster numbers for the York Simco Express, a minor midget AAA team, in the 2017-18 season: 48 goals and 44 assists in 34 games.
Quinton Byfield’s combination of size and scoring touch made him an easy Number One draft choice for the OHL’s Sudbury Wolves (Photo/Aaron Bell/OHL Images).
Byfield will enter the OHL sporting gaudy minor midget numbers. He averaged 2.71 points per game, third-best in the Eastern AAA Minor Midget Hockey League’s recent history.
Only forwards Steven Stamkos (2.98) of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Taylor Hall (2.88) of the New Jersey Devils had better marks in their minor midget careers.
“He is an exceptional player with a great future and his potential is amazing and our coaching staff is eager to work with him,” Rob Papineau, the Wolves’ vice president of hockey operations and general manager said of the 6-foot-4, 203-pound Byfield. “Our scouting staff has been unanimous on Quinton as the best player in the draft all season and we know that the fans and people of Greater Sudbury are going to love the opportunity to watch such a special player in a Wolves uniform.”
Byfield said he’s ready to go out and prove that the Wolves made the right choice.
“I’ll do good with the pressure,” Byfield told reporters. “It will always be making me want to step up my game, face new challenges and I think it will be great for me.”
Saturday’s draft was merely a formality for Byfield. He knew that he’d be Sudbury’s pick and addressed the media about it on Friday.
“It feels really great, especially coming to Sudbury, it’s a great organization, great staff and everything, I feel like it will be a great fit for me playing with all the great players they have here,” he told reporters Friday.
The Wolves are a major junior team in the OHL, a 20-team league where young players showcase their talents in hopes of being drafted by a National Hockey League team once they turn 18 or older.
Quinton Byfiled says he thrives under pressure. The Number One overall pick in the OHL Priority Selection Draft will get to prove that for the Sudbury Wolves (Photo/Aaron Bell/OHL Images).
“We put in place a goal to be a Memorial Cup contender with our mission being to develop 15-year-old boys into professional gentlemen of character when they leave our program,” Wolves Owner and Governor Dario Zulich said in a statement. “Quinton represents a significant step forward.”
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When the Washington Capitals face the St. Louis Blues at the Verizon Center on Fan Appreciation NightSaturday, perhaps no one in the arena will be more appreciative than Mike Marson.
Mike Marson was drafted by the Washington Capitals at age 18 in 1974.
The Capitals are scheduled to honor Marson, who was the National Hockey League’s second black player, with a video salute on the Verizon Center’s giant scoreboard during a TV timeout.
“I’m very pleased that the Capitals made a move to invite me to come down,” Marson, a Toronto resident, told me recently. “It’s an honor and a pleasure.”
Marson and his Capitals teammates endured the indignity of an 8-67-5 record in the team’s inaugural 1974-75 season, one of theworst records in NHL history.
But Marson also endured the indignities of racism – on and off the ice. Taunts and physical liberties by opposing players on the ice and racist letters delivered to his home and to the Capital Centre, the team’s original suburban Maryland home, were the unsettling norm.
“It was a culture shock,” Marson recalled.”Nobody should have to make a comment that you’re with the team to get on the plane; nobody should have to, when you get to the hotel, hear the staff ask the coach ‘is that gentleman with you?’ Or hear ‘we don’t have people like him stay at our hotel;’ and nobody should then have to go down in the morning for breakfast and have people usher by you non-stop because they won’t feed you. This is before you even get to the rink, before you have to deal with your opposition. It was non-stop.”
Marson’s story is chronicled in filmmaker Damon Kwame Mason’s black hockey history documentary, “Soul on Ice, Past, Present & Future,” which aired on NHL Network in February as part of Black History Month.
The left wing tallied only 24 goals 24 assists in 196 NHL regular season games and never appeared in a Stanley Cup playoff game.
Still, Marson left an imprint on the game. It’s evident in Montreal Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban and New York Rangers forward Rick Nash, who, as youngsters climbing the hockey ladder, trained off-ice under Marson during his post-hockey career as a martial arts instructor.
“The main thing about Mike was he taught P.K. how to be mentally strong,” Karl Subban, P.K.’s father, told me recently. “If you look at P.K. today, that’s one of the traits he has as a hockey player. It doesn’t matter what’s happening off the ice, it doesn’t matter what’s written about him or what’s said about him. He’s going to go out and play. And I’ve got to give Mike Marson credit for that.”
The elder Subban also credits Marson for igniting his love for hockey – a passion that he passed onto P.K., middle son Malcolm, a goaltender for the AHL ProvidenceBruins, and youngest son Jordan, a defenseman for the AHL’s Utica Comets.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, Karl Subban grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, where Marson played major junior hockey for the Sudbury Wolves, then of the Ontario HockeyAssociation.
Marson was the Man in Sudbury: a black skating, scoring, and fighting machine who wore the captain’s “C” on his jersey. He exuded unabashed blackness – sporting an Afro, Fu Manchu mustache and mutton chop sideburns.
Mike Marson, front row center, with the 1973-74 Sudbury Wolves (Photo/Courtesy Sudbury Wolves).
“Mike Marson gave my community a reason to watch hockey,” Karl Subban told me. “I loved the Sudbury Wolves.But when Mike came onto the scene I took it to another level. They were not just the Sudbury Wolves, they were my team because they had a player who looked like me.”
Between 1972 and 1974 Marson tallied 40 goals, 87 assists and amassed a whopping 263 penalty minutes in 126 regular season games for the Wolves. His hockey resume was strong enough that the expansion Capitals grabbed him with the first pick in the second round of the 1974 NHL Draft.
“I was pretty quick,” said Marson, who works as a bus driver in Toronto.”Having attended so many training camps where I was the only person of color, I had to be able to handle myself. I liked to score, I wasn’t afraid of the rough stuff.”
He was chosen ahead of Hockey Hall of FamersBryan Trottier, a center who scored 1,425 career points mainly for the New York Islanders, and Mark Howe, who tallied 742 career points as a defenseman playing primarily with the Philadelphia Flyers.
Mike Marson scored 16 goals in his rookie season with the Capitals in 1974-75. (Photo/Washington Capitals archives).
The Capitals believed they had a solid pick, so did other hockey people. Plus, it didn’t hurt to have a black player as a potential gate attraction in a new hockey city with a sizable black population.
Marson graced the cover of The Hockey News in October 1974. When he made his regular season debut with the Caps at age 19, he became the NHL’s second black player, the first since forward Willie O’Ree played his last game for the Boston Bruins in the 1960-61 season. O’Ree first joined the Bruins in the 1957-58 season.
Marson showed promise in an otherwise dismal inaugural season for the Capitals. The rookie finished third on the team in scoring with 16 and 12 assists in 76 games.
“He was a great talent – a great skater, great puck skills, tough as they come. He was the complete package,” said right wing Bill Riley, who became the NHL’s third black player when he joined the Capitals for one game in 1974-75 and went on to become a sometimes line mate of Marson’s from 1976 to 1979. “He was strong. I only came across two guys with that kind of strength: Stan Jonathan and Mike Marson. When Mike hit you, you knew you got hit.”
There weren’t many NHL players stronger than Mike Marson, according to former Capitals teammate Bill Riley, who was the league’s third black player (Photo/Washington Capitals archives).
Still, Riley, who went on to become Junior A hockey general manger and a head coach of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’sMoncton Wildcats in 1996-97, said “I was looking for bigger and better things for Mike.”
So was Marson. But being drafted at 18, becoming a $500,000 bonus baby, and going straight to the NHL without a proper apprenticeship in the minor leagues might have been too much too soon, he said.
And the culture shock of moving from Canada – where he considered himself a hockey player first – to an NHL city south of the U.S. Mason-Dixon line in the racially-tumultuous 1970s also took its toll.
“You can’t really compare my situation back in 1974 to today’s way of thinking,” he told me. “There’s no way to measure that by today’s uplifted society.”
But Marson says he doesn’t dwell on the painful past. Age brings perspective. And healing.
“You don’t get to be 60 and not have some regrets in your life – decisions you made here and there,” he told me. “You react differently than you did at 19 or 16. For me, it’s interesting to have put away all the negative things that transpired so many years ago – we’re talking over 40 years ago – when the world was a totally different place.”
When people ask Shandor Alphonso what number he wears on the back and sleeves of his black-and-white-striped National Hockey League linesman sweater, he smiles and assures them that “you won’t have any trouble finding me” on the ice.
Alphonso and Jay Sharrers are easily recognizable because they are the only black on-ice officials among the NHL’s small army of linesmen and referees.
Linesman Shandor Alphonso (Photo/Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images)
The 31-year-old Orangeville, Ontario, native is a relative newbie to the league. He’ll begin his second season as an NHL linesman when he takes to the ice in Buffalo Saturday in a game between the Sabres and Tampa Bay Lightning.
Last season, Alphonso worked 50 NHL games along with 37 American Hockey League contests and that league’s Calder Cup Final.
“I’m a big hockey fan, so I love that I have the best seat in the house,” Alphonso told me recently. “I enjoy the fact that I’m there. As an on-ice official I feel like I’m part of the game, I’m in the game.”
Sharrers, 48, is the veteran, starting his 26th year as an NHL official. He became the league’s first black linesman when he worked a match between the Boston Bruins and Quebec Nordiques in October 1990.
A native of New Westminster, British Columbia, Sharrers made history again when he became the league’s first black referee, officiating a contest between the Philadelphia Flyers and Lightning in April 2001.
Since joining the NHL, Sharrers has officiated in more than 1,190 NHL regular season
Linesman Jay Sharrers (Photo/ Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images)
games and 163 playoff games. He’s worked seven Stanley Cup Finals, the 2010Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the 2006 NHL All-Star Game in Dallas.
“Having done this job going on 26 years, I can say without a doubt that on a daily, game-in, game-out basis, you’re challenged every time you step on the ice,” Sharrers told me. “It’s very demanding. Physically, for one. And, of course, there’s the mental side of it because with the speed of the game now, and how it’s evolved into such a quick, fast-paced game, it’s a constant mental challenge game-in and game-out to be prepared, to be focused for 60 minutes of a game.”
Sharrers and Alphonso are co-workers but they haven’t worked an NHL game together yet. But that hasn’t stopped them from forming a mutual admiration society.
“He’s a tremendous young man, he’s got a great character, he’s got a good hockey IQ,” Sharrers said of Alphonso. “My goal when I got hired was to work the Stanley Cup, and I was fortunate enough to do that seven times. At this point in my career, it’s probably more of a responsibility to try to help the young people in the business, working with a guy like Shandor and give them the opportunity, the experience that was given to me when I first started by the veteran officials when I first started.”
“I looked up to him even before I started officiating,” Alphonso said of Sharrers. “Any time you see a player of color in the NHL, you notice him. And to see an on-ice official, it was pretty amazing to me. My very first training camp, he said ‘If you ever have any questions, no matter what it is, no matter what time, call.’ That was huge.”
So what possesses a person to put on minimal protective gear, carry a whistle, get on the ice and to try to police aggressive, well-armored players wielding sticks and possessing the power to launch pucks over 100 miles an hour in front of thousands of screaming, beer-fueled fans?
Sharrers and Alphonso both started out as hockey players. But Sharrers came to the realization at 15 that “my chances of making it as a player weren’t that good” so he sought a different path to the NHL.
“I turned my attention to officiating, thinking that could be a vehicle I could take to the NHL,” he told me. “I started working my way up through the junior hockey ranks in Canada, went to some officiating schools in the summer, got noticed, got scouted. I worked in the Western Hockey League, probably my first taste of elite hockey, in 1985. Then I got hired (by the NHL) in 1990. Officiating was a way of staying involved in a game I love.”
Alphonso played hockey through major juniors and college. He was a rugged left wing who played 183 games for the Ontario Hockey League’s Sudbury Wolves from 2001-02 to 2003-04, notching 25 goals, 48 assists and collecting 143 penalty minutes.
Before he became an NHL linesman, Shandor Alphonso was a rugged winger for Canada’s Lakehead University (Photo/Lakehead University)
He went on to skate for Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, from 2005-06 to 2009-10. He tallied 18 goals, 22 assists, and accumulated 121 penalty minutes in 111 games for the Thunderwolves.
“I was on the other end yelling at the referee,” he said.
During his fourth year at Lakehead, Alphonso received an invitation from the NHL to participate in the NHL Amateur Exposure Combine, an officiating camp designed to entice major junior, U.S., and Canadian college hockey players to consider becoming linesmen or referees.
After his final season at Lakehead, Alphonso was prepared to sign a professional contract to play in the Central Hockey League when he had a sudden change of heart.
“The NHL kind of told us, ‘If you’re good, you can get to the NHL in five years,'” He recalled. “I thought why not give it try, I never officiated before, and I really enjoyed it once I tried it out.”
Alphonso chose becoming an NHL linesman over chasing a pro hockey career (Photo/Courtesy Shandor Alphonso).
“Learned a lot from him and the instructors at that camp,” Alphonso said. “In three days, they showed me everything, the basics and the fundamentals for officiating.”
He then embarked on an experience-gathering, dues-paying journey through the alphabet soup of hockey leagues.
“I went from minor hockey to the OHL,” he said. “Second-year officiating in the OHL and in the OHA as well, doing major junior and Tier II junior – did both those leagues for three years. Also worked minor hockey at the same time. I felt I had a lot to learn so I wanted to be on the ice as much as I could.”
Alphonso, left, worked the AHL’s 2015 Calder Cup Final between the Utica Comets and Manchester Monarchs (Photo/Courtesy Lindsay A. Mogle/Utica Comets)
The NHL invited Alphonso back to its exposure combine in summer 2014 and hired him two weeks after the camp ended. Now he sometimes finds himself officiating games with former hockey teammates, opponents, or players he trained with before he donned the zebra stripes.
“I had a situation in the AHL, an individual I used to train with quite a bit. I had to kick him out of the face-off because of a violation he committed,” Alphonso recalled. “He comes over to me in a TV time-out, he’s like ‘Are you serious? You’re kicking me out of a face-off? We used to run hills and puke together after hot days working out so hard and you’re kicking me out?'”
Alphonso replied “Yeah, we used to spend a lot of time training and working hard and running hills together, but I have to do this job now.”
