Jay Sharrers made NHL history on Oct. 6, 1990, when he stepped onto the ice at Boston Garden for the game between the Boston Bruins and the Quebec Nordiques. The 22-year-old became the first black official ever to work in the NHL.
Like many officials, Sharrers started out with dreams of making the NHL as a player. But by age 15, he realized he'd need to take a different path. He worked in junior hockey and the minor leagues before being hired by the NHL.
Sharrers worked as an NHL linesman throughout the 1990s, then decided to try his hand at being a referee, meaning that he'd have to go back to the minors and work his way back to the NHL. He faced racial taunts while officiating in the American Hockey League and East Coast Hockey League but was able to work his way back to the NHL and became the first black referee in NHL history on April 3, 2001, when he worked a game between the Philadelphia Flyers and Florida Panthers in Philadelphia.
His debut as a referee drew much more attention than his first game as a linesman 11 years earlier.
"I kind of chuckled about it because I'd already worked for 10 years in the NHL as a linesman," he told Sportsnet. "But sometimes linesmen are a secondary footnote to the craft of officiating."
Sharrers worked 136 NHL games as a referee, then went back to being a linesman. He remained in the NHL through 2016, when a hip injury forced him to retire. By then he had worked seven Stanley Cup Finals, the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, 1,419 regular-season games and 204 in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
He told Sportsnet he had faced only one overt incident of racism from a player during his time in the NHL, and that the matter was handled internally.
"I'm happy to say that, despite the fact that when I started there were not a lot of black players and no black coaches in the league," he said, "I never really experienced much [racism] at the NHL level."
