On Sept. 28, 1962, in Spruce Grove, Alberta, a boy was born who would grow up to become the first Black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Grant Fuhr, adopted roughly three weeks after his birth by Betty Wheeler and Robert Fuhr, went on to backstop the Edmonton Oilers dynasty of the 1980s and reshape what fans across Canada expected a goaltender’s path to look like.
Fuhr’s birth father was Black Canadian and his birth mother belonged to the Enoch Cree Nation, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the African American Registry and The Hockey Writers. His adoptive parents, who were white, raised him in Spruce Grove, a small community west of Edmonton. According to a Hockey Hall of Fame biography reproduced by the African American Registry, Fuhr decided at age seven that he wanted to play goal, and his father converted the family’s basement into a practice rink to help him train.
At 17, Fuhr left high school to play junior hockey with the Victoria Cougars of the Western Hockey League. The Edmonton Oilers made him the eighth overall pick in the 1981 NHL Entry Draft, and he made his NHL debut that same year, during an era when the league had seen only a handful of Black players since Willie O’Ree broke the colour barrier with the Boston Bruins in 1958. Fuhr later said those who came before him “did all the heavy lifting,” according to NHL.com, crediting O’Ree and Bill Riley as pioneers who cleared his path.
Over parts of ten seasons in Edmonton, Fuhr won the Stanley Cup four times as the Oilers’ primary goaltender, in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988, according to NHL.com and Hockey-Reference.com. In the process, he became the first Black player to have his name engraved on the Stanley Cup, in 1984. The Canadian Encyclopedia and Wikipedia count a fifth Oilers championship, in 1990, though Fuhr was sidelined by injury for that year’s playoffs and did not play; Bill Ranford took over in net and won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. Fuhr also backstopped Canada to victory at the 1987 Canada Cup, playing all nine games of the tournament, and won the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top goaltender for the 1987-88 season after 40 wins, finishing second to Mario Lemieux in Hart Trophy voting for the league’s most valuable player.
Fuhr’s career included a serious setback. In 1990, the NHL suspended him for 59 games after he disclosed a past struggle with cocaine use, one of the more prominent such disclosures by a North American athlete at the time. He returned to play at a high level for several more seasons with Toronto, Buffalo, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Calgary, finishing his career with 403 wins, then a milestone figure for NHL goaltenders.
The Oilers retired Fuhr’s number 31 in 2003. That same year, on Nov. 2, 2003, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, becoming the first Black player so honoured, according to the Hall and NHL.com. In 2017, the NHL named him one of its 100 Greatest Players as part of the league’s centennial celebrations.
Fuhr’s story remains a touchstone in the history of Black Canadians in hockey, a sport whose highest professional ranks stayed overwhelmingly white for decades after O’Ree’s 1958 debut. His path from a basement rink in Spruce Grove to the Hockey Hall of Fame is marked every year on Sept. 28, the date of his birth in 1962.
