Herb Carnegie

Herbert Henry Carnegie was born in Toronto on 8 November 1919. He grew up listening to Hockey Night in Canada and dreaming of joining his heroes on the Toronto Maple Leafs. He began his career in 1938 with the Toronto Young Rangers, a junior team that played at Maple Leaf Gardens, and became a rising star in junior hockey.

In 1939 he went north to Timmins to play intermediate and senior hockey, and with his brother Ossie and Manny McIntyre formed the Black Aces, the first all-Black line in hockey outside the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes. He later starred in the Quebec Senior League, where he played alongside future Montreal Canadiens, and was widely seen as one of the best players in the country.

Despite that, he was never offered a place in the NHL. According to the veteran referee Red Storey, the Maple Leafs' owner Conn Smythe watched Carnegie try out and said he would give $10,000 to turn him white, though some have doubted whether Smythe really said it. Others point to Carnegie's decision to decline an offer from the New York Rangers to play in their minor-league system, but he and many others have long maintained that racism kept him out of the league.

After retiring as a player in the early 1950s Carnegie started the Future Aces Hockey School, one of the first hockey schools in Canada, in 1954 or 1955, and wrote the Future Aces Creed on positive attitude, sportsmanship and citizenship. In 1987 he and his family established the Carnegie Future Aces Foundation, which has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in bursaries for young people's education. He also invented the Carnegie System, the first instructional hockey board used in the NHL.

Carnegie published his biography, A Fly in a Pail of Milk, in 1996, and received the Order of Ontario in 1996 and the Order of Canada in 2003. He entered Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 2014, and is a member of 14 halls of fame. He died in Toronto on 9 March 2012, at 92, and in November 2022 was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Builder category.