This column is originally from the 2003-04 season and returns unchanged, to complement this week's Golden Years segment on the Inside Hockey Radio Program.

Not many men have played two sports at a professional level. Even fewer have combined baseball and hockey. Manny McIntyre is the only professional hockey player to have also played in baseball's Negro Leagues. With his wife Rita away at the bingo hall, he chose to spend a free afternoon remembering his year-round athletic career that extended for nearly two decades through the 1940's and 1950's.

Manny McIntyre grew up outside Fredericton, New Brunswick and was an outstanding athlete from the outset. Before youth hockey moved indoors and suffered from the meddling of adults, small-town kids played wherever they found ice, on ponds, rivers or lakes. Manny McIntyre played with his buddies on the St. John River. It was here that kids of all ages got unlimited ice time and that Manny spent most of his winters.

Without boards to hem it in, a missed pass or errant shot could send the puck hundreds of yards from the designated playing area. Somebody had to go get it. It was usually a task assigned to one of the younger boys.

Frank (Mush) Morehouse is a lifelong friend and was a frequent teammate of McIntyre's. He was also one of the older kids. He remembers the early years.

"Manny is three years younger than me. He's 85 and we're from Devon, just across the river from Fredericton. We spent quite a bit of time on the St. John River. That's a large river and every January it used to flood over.

Sometimes we'd play with wooden pucks, hardwood. Our saw wasn't that good and it would run. The puck would sometimes be an inch and a half on one side and only an inch on the other. Of course those things used to curve and we wouldn't hit the net all of that often.

That's how Manny developed that long stride of his. He was one of the younger guys so he'd have to go for the run. He used to do that without ever complaining. Manny always wore a little black peaked cap and it would fly off constantly. It used to happen about twenty times a game."

McIntyre moved into organized hockey with a local senior team, the Fredericton Capitals. After a 38-39 season that saw the team win the Southern and Central Championships for Atlantic Canada, the Capitals played off for the Maritime Championship. They won the first game of a two game total point series at home but lost the second game to their rivals from Prince Edward Island when they had to play on artificial ice.

McIntyre moved on to Truro, Nova Scotia the next season where he played both baseball and hockey for the hometown Bearcats. He received a phone call from his buddy, Mush, now in Timmins, Ontario, informing him that he was playing for the Buffalo Ankerites, a local senior team sponsored by a major mining concern of the same name.

Among his teammates were a couple of colored fellows from Toronto, the Carnegie brothers, Herb and Ossie. Morehouse sold the team manager on the idea of an all black forward line.

Over sixty years later McIntyre remembers the call.

"I said, 'Yes, I would come if they'd send me a return ticket' because at that time I had no money and it was a long way to go. A couple days later I had a return ticket so I went and tried out for the team and it was OK. Halfway through the season they gave us a job working in the gold mines and I got my fingers caught in a machine. I couldn't play again until the end of the season."

Minus parts of a couple of digits, McIntyre returned to the ice for the play downs leading to the Allan Cup finals which would crown the country's senior champions, a distinction only a notch or two beneath a Stanley Cup victory at the time.

"We went to Hamilton. They made me a special glove. Hamilton beat us but they had a hard time."

McIntyre played the following season for the Timmins Buffalo Ankerites and, as did many Canadian lads at the time, joined the army. A year later, following his discharge, McIntyre spent a summer in Three Rivers, Quebec, playing ball. The only black on the team, he came to the attention of the Negro National League's New York Cubans when they barnstormed their way through Montreal.

"When the Cubans were here in Montreal playing, the manager came up to Three Rivers to scout me and asked me if I'd go down there. The Cubans stayed in Montreal for three or four days. I came in to see the game. I was in the stands and the manager saw me. They had no umpire so I umpired the game. After that I went down to the New York Cubans."

After playing the last few weeks of the season at shortstop, it was time to get back to hockey. This time out McIntyre found himself in the small industrial town of Shawinigan, Quebec that iced a side in the Inter-Provincial League.

"The coach knew me from Truro. I went there and stayed a week, practicing with them. They saw I was good enough to play."

As Mush Morehouse had done a few years earlier in Northern Ontario, McIntyre sold Theo Racette, the Cataracts' manager, on the financial potential of an all-colored line. Racette asked if Manny really thought that he could persuade the others to come join him.

"I said, 'Give me the phone.' I got on the phone and asked information to get me Ossie or Herbie Carnegie at the Buffalo Ankerite Gold Mine. I hung up the phone and talked with Racette and after a while the phone rang. It was Ossie.

After catching up on each others' news, McIntyre suggested that the Carnegie brothers join him in Shawinigan. Unlike other stops in their careers, they'd be there strictly to play hockey. With a guaranteed salary of $150 a week, there was no need to work at a day job to make ends meet.

"They agreed to come and the next week they came in Ossie's old Mercury, full of clothes. The first game we played was in Lachine (a suburb of Montreal). Herbie got three goals, I got three and Ossie got two or three. We won 11-2. From then on, whenever we went anywhere it was jam-packed."

The Shawinigan Cataracts didn't fare too well over the rest of the season, finishing last in the four team league but the Colored Line had established itself as a force to be reckoned with, both on the ice and at the box office. All three finished among the league's top ten scorers, laying the foundation of their now-legendary status among veteran hockey observers in Quebec.

The following season saw them move as a group to the Sherbrooke entry of the Quebec Senior Hockey League, a loop that rivaled the AHL in quality of play. As they had done in Shawinigan the previous season, they were an immediate hit and instant drawing cards.

One of their main rivals was the Montreal Royals. The Forum was packed to the rafters every time the Sherbrooke St. Francis squad came to town on a Sunday afternoon. So was the rink in Ottawa where they faced the Senators on a regular basis.

After a couple years it became obvious that the NHL was not going to come knocking. The Brown Bombers, as the line was also known, could have made any NHL team of the time but none of them seemed to grasp the idea that blacks could play hockey at a high level or draw crowds like they did for Sherbrooke and Shawinigan.

While blacks were not afforded an honest shot in many areas in North America in the 1940's, Europe was a different story. A French independent team tried to recruit the line but was only able to persuade two of them to go overseas. Herb Carnegie was married by this time and found the distance between his family in Toronto and his job in Sherbrooke unbearable as it was.

Herb decided to remain in Sherbrooke but Manny and Ossie were soon on the boat, headed to Paris looking for adventure as members of a traveling team owned by Charles Ritz, better known for his hotels than his sports team.

Since France was not a hotbed of high caliber hockey, most of the players on the team were imports. McIntyre called on old friend, Mush Morehouse to help round out the team. He didn't need a lot of coaxing to sign on.

"Herbie didn't want to go so Ossie and I got on the boat. I talked to Mush and he wanted to go. We went and we stayed six months. Our club was the Racing Club de Paris. We barnstormed. We had our own plane with the team name on the side."

Challenges came from all over Europe and were accepted. The Racing Club played all over England, Scotland, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia and usually came out on top.

"We had a great player, Pete Bessone, who had played for the Providence Reds the season before. He was our player/coach. We played sixty games that year. We lost four and tied two. They gave us a little gold plaque at the end of the season."

France was a haven from the racism endemic in America at that time with black artists and athletes moving and finding an enthusiastic acceptance across the Atlantic that was unknown at home. Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker were only a few of the black American expatriates who found themselves invited to all the A-list parties in Paris.

The same principle applied to Ossie Carnegie and Manny McIntyre. They became celebrities with all the trappings.

"They thought we were big-leaguers." McIntyre recalls. "Ossie and I had lunch with Lena Horne."

But all good things must come to an end. At the conclusion of the season, it was time to return home to Canada. The means of transportation taken reflected the status that the Racing Club's black players had achieved in their six months abroad.

"At the end of the season they sent Mush, Harvey Parent, Paul Lessard and Bessone home on the boat and put Ossie and I on the plane. We came back and signed immediately with Sherbrooke."

It was to be the last hurrah for the Black Aces, yet another of the line's nicknames. The following season Herb went to Quebec City where he suited up for the Aces under coach Punch Imlach. Ossie stayed in Sherbrooke and Manny moved back to the Maritimes, joining a Moncton, New Brunswick, team.

McIntyre was traded for ex-Toronto Maple Leaf star and future Hall of Famer, Gord Drillon and found himself playing in St John. A wrist injury limited him to a half-season and he finished up his hockey career the next year in Dolbeau, a small pulp and paper mill town in the woods of northern Quebec.

Upon retiring from both hockey and baseball, the necessity of supporting his family was still an ongoing concern. McIntyre took one of the few career paths then open to blacks without extensive formal education and joined the Canadian National Railway as a porter.

He later moved to the airport as a baggage handler, a job he held until shopping-style carts replaced the red-capped porters.

McGill University in Montreal was McIntyre's last employer. He began as a messenger and in pretty short order found himself charged with the running of the campus parking lots.

While he certainly never became wealthy playing hockey, McIntyre did pick up a number of good friends along the way. One of them, Hall of Famer, Red Storey, refereed in the QSHL as well as in the NHL. His opinion of hockey's only all-black line is clear and up front.

"The Colored Line, as a line, could have played on any team, any time, anywhere."

Storey's bluntly worded letter of endorsement was instrumental to McIntyre's 1997 induction to the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame, as one of its few multi-sport members for his prowess on the rink as well as on the diamond.

For a man who was blocked from attaining his true potential, McIntyre is surprisingly without bitterness at the unfairness that prevented him from reaching the NHL. He knows that he was good enough and that's good enough for him.

Retired for good for about a decade now, he lives in comfortable surroundings in Montreal's south shore suburb of Candiac, where he bought a home over forty years ago. He still follows both hockey and baseball avidly and is often asked to speak about his life by local organizations, but to his dismay is often unable to accept their invitations.

He's had a few health problems recently and is a little unsteady on his feet but his memory, appetite and good nature are unaffected. He has plans, following years of urging from one of his sons, to turn his boxes of clippings and photos from over a half-century ago into a book.

Having leafed through the cardboard cartons that presently house the projected volume's contents, it is a book that I look forward to reading in its final form.