The story of John Paris Jr.: 'To be coached by him was an experience'

It wasn’t until he watched it later on video that he realized how set up the whole thing was. It was on the video where he noticed a man, standing in the chaos, point in his direction and give a simple instruction: Get him.

John Paris Jr. was the head coach for Macon that night, playing on the road against rival Huntsville.

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The game started late because of an issue with the ice. That happens in the South. It also gave the fans an extended happy hour and they took full advantage. When Macon jumped out to an early 3-0 lead, Paris’ assistant coach, Dave Starman, noted the personnel sent on the ice in the final seconds of the first period. Alarm bells went off.

“You have to call timeout,” Starman told Paris.

“They’re not going to do anything,” Paris answered.

“Look who is on the ice,” Starman said.

It was a crew ready to fight and as soon as the puck was dropped, so were the gloves. This wasn’t just a fight to spark a team, this was a classic mid-’90s southern minor hockey league brawl. The goalies charged into the action. Players started hopping over the boards to find someone to scrap.

“It was a shitshow,” Starman said in telling the story years later.

In the chaos, Starman lost sight of his head coach. Last he saw, he was yelling, trying to keep players on the bench. Then he was gone.

Chaos was all around. Jerseys pulled over heads. Equipment everywhere. Blood steaming down faces. In the middle of it, Starman searched for Paris, and eventually found him. He was handcuffed to a post and bleeding from a cut by his eye. He’d been arrested for inciting a riot, a bit of news that set Starman off. He started yelling at the cop. He started yelling at anyone who would listen. It was all ludicrous. Violence everywhere and the only one in handcuffs was the black head coach.

Starman couldn’t help but wonder — was this just the usual minor league hockey moment? Paris certainly wasn’t the first visiting coach to be arrested by police in a rivalry minor league hockey game. He suspected there was more to it.

“There was part of me that thought to myself, ‘If I was the head coach, would I be chained to a post?’” Starman said.

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He probably knows the answer. Paris certainly does.

“When you’re the first at something, you have to expect those things,” he said.

The firsts are many for John Paris Jr.

He was the first black coach to lead a professional hockey team to a championship when he guided the Atlanta Knights to the Turner Cup in 1994. In 1967, he became the first black player in the Southern Division of the Eastern Hockey League.

By the time he was handcuffed following an on-ice brawl, it was just the latest race-related moment he had to deal with while pursuing a coaching career in hockey.

In 1987, while coaching midget AAA, he entered an arena to see a dummy hanging from the rafters with his name on it, along with the N-word.

“The police hauled the people out,” Paris said.

Another time, when coaching major junior hockey in Canada, a person spit in his face. He’s had had coins thrown at him. Beer cans. There were nights when he needed to be escorted by protection when going to the rink. There have been death threats and a gun pulled on him in a Milwaukee parking lot.

“You can’t argue with a person like that,” he said.

While the coach of the Atlanta Knights, he once showed a pile of angry hate mail he received to the team’s administrative assistant.

“The usual stuff. The N-word. Scum. Compared to animals. What they’re going to do to you,” Paris said, describing the contents. “The normal stuff that racists do.”

She helped him stack up the pile of hate and took it all to a dumpster outside the Omni, the old arena where the team played.

This is garbage, she said.

You worry about coaching.

For most of his life, that’s exactly what Paris has done. He guided the Knights to the playoffs every season he coached the team. Same thing for the Central League’s Macon Whoopee after that. During his time coaching midget and junior hockey, he helped lead 40 players to Division I colleges and 12 to the first round of the NHL Draft, and more than 200 players moved on to play professionally.

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All this, in a sport that doesn’t have a strong history of being particularly inclusive.

“I was just a coach who happened to be black,” he said, as he often has. “Coach by choice, black by nature.”

To understand Paris, listen to the next part of the story from that night in Huntsville. He’s hauled to jail and what he remembers with fondness was that it wasn’t his team that came to get him out. It was Huntsville and its booster club. The archrival. To him that was an indication that, yes,  there were a few ignorant people out there, but also those looking to help.

“I had to deal with a racial issue but there was a positive side that came out of it,” Paris said.

And to truly understand Paris, go back to his childhood in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where he played baseball as a kid. This was his sport. He worshiped Willie Mays. He loved it and was good at it. Just like his dad, who once got a letter of interest from the New York Giants.

During one game in a neighboring town, he started hearing taunts in the outfield. He wasn’t even 10 years old and he was being booed.

His dad, John Sr., sat him down. As he would do again when dealing with racist taunts while his son played hockey.

“He said, ‘Son, it’s because you’re good at what you’re doing. You start worrying when they do not notice you,” Paris said. “You’re doing things other kids cannot do at your age. You have to expect that. You need to use that as motivation. The day you do not hear a sound, you start asking yourself questions.”

The taunts, the yelling, even the threats — it served as fuel. It meant he was doing something noticeable. In hockey, it was often something nobody had ever done before.

In 1963, Paris received letters from the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, all wanting to send him to Ontario to start his hockey career in their organizations. But the Montreal Canadiens actually sent their scout, in person.

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Paris was warming up for a baseball game in May when his brother came racing up on his bike to let him know he needed to get home. Now.

“There’s a Mr. Bowman waiting for you,” he said.

A young scout for the Canadiens named Scotty Bowman had seen Paris play. Bowman saw potential. He saw the offensive gifts that came in the small frame, as well as hockey IQ and energy. What he wasn’t concerned with was race. Bowman played on a line in junior with a black player named Stan Maxwell. Willie O’Ree was playing in Quebec.

Bowman was simply looking for talent when he approached the Paris family.

They sat in the Paris’ living room and Bowman won them over with his honesty. He was blunt with what the expectations would be. To make it in the Canadiens’ system, you had to have character. You had to prepare. You had to perform.

“He said, one thing I remember was this: ‘We look at you as a hockey player,’” Paris said. “He never brought up ethnic background, other than to say, ‘Will you be able to handle the pressure if there’s pressure? You just happen to be a person of color. We’re looking at a hockey player.’”

“He wasn’t very big but he was really smart,” Bowman said of Paris. “He was energetic … he had a lot of confidence. He wasn’t shy at all.”

Later that year, a letter arrived in the mail. It had the “Club de Hockey Canadien” letterhead at the top. It had the neat signature of Bowman at the bottom. In between were the details of the invitation Paris had been waiting for:

We have made arrangements with the rail agent in your home town for your return transportation to Montreal to attend our August training camp.

The letter continued.

Please do not forget to bring your skates and all other equipment will be supplied by the Canadien Hockey Club.

The next year, hockey took him to the Metropolitan Montreal Junior League, where he played for the Maisonneuve Braves, a team that featured future Hall of Famer Guy Lapointe. A hot start earned him the nickname “Chocolate Rocket” from the local press. But pain and fatigue that had pursued him from his childhood got worse. One moment he was sweating. Another he had the chills. He was passing blood. He was vomiting. It was passed off as flu but it never went away.

Newspaper clipping of John Paris Jr. from his time playing in Knoxville.

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He went on to play for the Sorel Black Hawks in Quebec. And then, like it would do many times in his life, the game of hockey brought him into the South. In 1967, he became the first black player in the Southern Division of the EHL when he suited up for the Knoxville Knights. He had no idea about this until a reporter asked him about it.

“I wasn’t there to break barriers or anything like that,” Paris said. “I was there for hockey.”

But it was there he learned how the sport could bond teammates beyond any racial divides. He found a place to stay in an all-black neighborhood. Two of his white teammates decided to live with him as he pursued his hockey dream. Nine games into that pursuit in Knoxville, his illness got worse. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with one specialist saying he’d been suffering with it since he was 14 years old. His hockey playing career was over.

His hockey career, though, was just beginning.

John Paris Jr. is a man of many talents. He speaks multiple languages. He can play the organ. He can play the piano. In his book, he tells the story of accompanying Ray Charles on the keyboard one night at a Montreal club. His paternal grandmother was a school principal. His dad worked for the post office but was also an entrepreneur. The Paris family was one that was tight and valued education. And constant learning.

That led to him earning a master’s degree in sports psychology, a study that would shape his approach as a coach. As he worked his way up through midget and junior leagues as a coach, his unique focus on the mental approach ultimately led him to Atlanta. He was initially brought in just to coach the city’s roller hockey team, the Fire Ants. The owners of that team also owned the IHL’s Atlanta Knights.

Charles Felix was the CFO and co-owner of those Atlanta hockey teams and he remembers joining Paris on a trip to California for the roller hockey league meetings. It was on this trip that he got a close look at Paris’ smarts and passion, along with his relentless energy.

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“He was a real knowledgeable guy when it came to hockey. And this isn’t just the skill of hockey,” Felix said. “He really had a sense of understanding people, understanding what they needed to succeed. Not only skill but the psychology of hockey. He had strange ways of bringing people to their potential.”

Through the years, his players would certainly testify to that conclusion. Paris was constantly trying to think of new ways to both teach and sharpen his players. Stan Drulia, who played for Paris in Atlanta, remembers one night in Milwaukee when the team was playing its third game in three days. After two periods, the team was completely gassed. So Paris turned the lights off in the dressing room. He had everybody lay on the floor and close their eyes. He was using meditation to get the team’s energy back.

“You can get the hard-ass coaches — ‘Get your head out of your ass!’ He wasn’t like that,” Drulia said. “I don’t know if manipulate the mind is the right phrase but he was a motivator of the mind. That’s the way he went about his business. And he did a great job getting to know the players.”

Mathieu Dugas was a goalie who played junior hockey for Paris in the mid-2000s. As a teenager, Dugas had a tendency to coast when things were going well. He was talented and would rise to the occasion in the biggest games. But he was inconsistent. He wasn’t mentally prepared to play in the games that grind their way through the regular-season schedule.

Paris tried different approaches to fix it. There was the time they sat in his office, eyes closed, and envisioned Dugas making saves for 30 minutes. It’s a technique the young goalie would go on to use during four years at Bemidji State University.

But it was the benching that really woke Dugas up. For 14 consecutive games, Dugas sat on the bench even though he was the best goalie on the roster. He was furious.

“He wanted to see what kind of mental toughness I would have and how that would impact me in practices, how it would impact me off the ice,” Dugas said. “We had screaming matches in his office. I didn’t understand why he was doing that. After the fact, I found out, he really wanted me to find my game and not take anything for granted.”

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It worked. The inconsistent goalie stopped overlooking starts. They all had meaning now, something he learned when they were taken away. It completely changed his approach.

“He really pushed us mentally,” Dugas said. “You walked to the rink, you didn’t know what to expect. There was no ordinary days … to be coached by him was an experience.”

In Atlanta, during the 1993-94 season, the ownership of the Knights suspected they had a coach in Paris who could make a difference. There was a late-season coaching change and Paris took the helm. It was during that stretch when he became the first black hockey coach to win a professional championship, guiding the team to a Turner Cup. The clincher came over Fort Wayne in front of 13,000 screaming fans in the Omni.

“He had us playing at a high tempo,” said Mike Greenlay, the goalie who led the Knights to the title. “It suited his personality. He was a high-energy, up-tempo kind of coach. It matched his personality.”

During that playoff run, the Knights beat a Fort Wayne team coached by Bruce Boudreau. He coached against Rick Dudley in that league. Ken Hitchcock’s last game in the IHL with Kalamazoo came against Paris, with a couple impressive wins earning him a shot in Dallas.

“He was passionate and fiery, holy smokes,” Hitchcock said. “He was willing to go anywhere and do anything to coach. You have to really admire a guy like that.”

“I enjoyed coaching against him because it was a challenge,” Dudley said. “His teams played fast. For today’s hockey, his game he played would have fit in.”

After Paris guided the Knights to a championship, the city threw a parade for the rare champions in a sports scene that didn’t have many during that era. Peachtree Street was shut down. So was Marietta Street. The parade had fire engines and motorcycles and the team’s Zamboni. At one point, Paris heard voices yelling at him from the crowd.

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“You tell those white boys, you the boss,” came a shout from an African-American attendee.

Another man shouted, “You the man! You the man!” Others started thanking him. He saw tears in the eyes from a couple watching.

“I didn’t understand them thanking me. This is hockey,” Paris said. “That’s when I realized, it wasn’t important for John Paris Jr. It was important for them. It shook me a bit. It’s humbling and it’s pressure. There are certain expectations that come with that.”

While his contemporaries worked their way up the ladder, Paris kept grinding away. He was fired in Atlanta during the 1995-96 season. Got a shot coaching the Macon Whoopee and led them to the playoffs every year for three seasons before stepping down. Health problems continued to sideline his pursuit of an NHL coaching job. A back operation in the late 90s kept him out of the game for a bit. He had to turn down opportunities in Europe.

“When I was healthy, I can hold my own,” he said. “I’ve always been able to get the most out of what I’ve had.”

As he has gotten older, Paris’ focus has shifted from coaching to teaching. He lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where he helps young players work on the mental side of the game at his learning center. He hosts seminars for players and coaches. He helps coach the U.S. Junior Development Program.

A hockey career that started with a visit in his living room by a Hall of Famer who became the best hockey coach who ever lived continues on. Paris is still shaping lives. Dugas, the goalie he once benched? He went on to earn a minor in psychology. He’s now coaching too and knows he can call on his former coach at any time for advice.

“He’s still at it,” Dugas said, the admiration clear. “It’s his life.”

Paris is 72 years old.

“He became a good coach. He worked at it,” Scotty Bowman said. “He’s a real survivor.”

(Top photo courtesy of John Paris Jr.)

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