who had never seen him beforeaban­ doned their penchant for restlessness

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Six decades after he acquired a reputation as one of the fastest http://www.fifa15sale.com ;skaters his sport had ever seenWillie O'Ree still has not slowed down. Oefying a birth certificate that confirms he turned sixty-nine years old on October 15 2004he travels relentlessly. Nary a week goes by during an NHL season that now stretches from October until mid-June that he doesn't give wife Oeljeet a goodbye kiss and dash from his home in a suburb of San Oiego to the airport for a business trip somewhere in North America. He's been to each of the NHL's thirty cities numerous times and to countless other places to spread the gospel of hockey in an effort to convert the young.

On a crisp early eve ng in November 1999an audience of youngsters at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center in downtown Raleigh boys and girlsages five to fifteen who had never seen him beforeaban­ doned their penchant for restlessness and stood at rapt attention as he spoke because they could sense they were listening to someone important.

O'R with grey hair thinned by age and fingers misshapen by decades of hocke stood ramrod straight with posture that would make a major general proud. He began his presentation by showing the twenty-five youngsters the proper way to hold a hockey stick.Not a real hockey stick such as e one he held on January 181958 at The Forum in Montreal when he became the first black man ever to compete in an NHL game. Not the kind of stick he used as a left wing for eleven di :erent professional teams in a career that spanned twenty-one years. For his young audience in Raleighhe held aloft a four-foot-tall child-sized stick with a bright orange plastic blade-an appropriate visual aid for hockey neophytes. Perhaps none of the children would ever feel compelled to hold a hockey stick again. Or perhaps a future hockey professional or college player held a stick for the first time that day. The latter possibility is a large part of what drives him to bring hockey to the masses asarguabl e most indefatigable ambassador in the sport.

Since 1997 he has served as director of youth development for the NHL/USA Hockey Oiversity Task Force. He isin effecthockey's Pied Pipe an ideal role for a man whose zest for life and eternal optimism can be infectiousa man who would have uttered Ernie Banks' famous line about baseball-"Let's play two" had he thought of it first. Q'Ree had a Banksian passion for hockey. He still doestwenty-four years after his last professional game.