A Good Sport

My so-called sporting life

When I first wrote this, I had just missed the World Cup . . .

And the Stanley Cup and the Grey Cup.

My relationship with sports is much like my relationship with vegetables. I know they are good for me and society in general but, I have finally come to recognize that I will never really ever be much of a vegetarian or a player.

There was only one trophy ever in my life. It would have been maybe in grade three where I won a marbles tournament. I got my photo in the paper with three other boys.

I tried some Little League baseball, good catcher but no arm. We had no gym or football field in my small town, so football and basketball were nonstarters.

Still, in 1955, I was a pretty typical Canadian boy falling in love with hockey. I lived the hockey sweater story when on Christmas morning my folks bought me a Black Hawk sweater instead of a Bruins jersey. My hometown of Battleford had the Beaver Bruins, a farm team to the Estevan Bruins who went from there to the Boston Bruins. It was humiliating to wear a Black Hawk sweater in a Bruin town.

Still under the one light of the King Street school outdoor rink, I skated my heart out with the Hogenson boys, one of whom went on to the NHL and chased the Stanley Cup. The only Stanley Cup for me was the nickname I gave my jock, a private joke that thankfully never got out of my own head (until now).

I played hockey until my Bantam League year where the real hurt of old school coaching crunched into play. It’s a short story. Our team is on the way to provincial finals and I am on my way to the hospital with serious knee issues. It is Christmas. I still believed that I am on the team, just on an injury list. The boys win it all and come home to a victory banquet and lovely black leather jackets.

Somehow the coaches forget to send me an invitation or a jacket. Just a lot on their minds at the time I suppose.

So, I took up that other great Canadian game, the roaring game of curling. I felt I was pretty good at it and our team felt we could do well as we entered what was then called the Canadian Schoolboy Championships.

We were indeed doing quite well and made it to the Regional Championships. We drew against some small backwater town called Speers with some Ukrainian brothers on their team. Easy peasy.

The brothers Lukowich, Mike and Ed, proceeded to kick our arrogant little butts and of course, went on to win the 1962 Pepsi Canadian Schoolboy Championship and numerous Briars and Hall of Fame stuff later.

Gracefully, I retreated into the familiar warmth of Romeo’s pool hall, where the cool sport of eight ball and tobacco smoke lived in comfortable harmony. My sporting player dreams slipped away like a pretty girl at the sock hop.

Usually when a would-be jock, finally admits that sports are not loving him back, he changes channels and moves from the random to the fandom.

Again, not so much for me. My Canadian roots lacked sufficient watering I suppose, and soon that peaceable sixties vibe met the Broad Street Bullies and Don Cherry. I did not warm up to Bobby Clarke or Grapes and the peaceable sixties won that round. I did not become an NHL hockey fan.

Then came 1985 and work took us from hippie wood burner smoke into the heart of The Big Smoke. I expected a cultural smackdown but was taken by joy when I fell in love with Queen Street and the big city. That’s another story but there was a sports fan twist.

My daughter was checking out Maple Leaf Gardens and met Wendell Clark. They turned down an invitation to an NHL party leaving me quite proud of her youthful decision making. However, I then used my freelancing gift of gab to score an interview with Wendell. It went well but got even better when he suggested we go into the next room where the Chief was getting a condom on his skates.

Oh my . . . now we are deep in my vintage hockey head. The Chief was George Armstrong, a true Canadian hockey legend and he was getting fitted with the new skate technology. The CCM guy was heating the skate, encasing it in plastic and sucking the air out to perfectly fit his foot. I spent the next hour with George Armstrong and his amazing tales of the history of the skate in the Gardens. I was on air walking out into the streets of Toronto and should the Leafs ever win . . .

In Toronto, I fell in love with baseball and more specifically, the Blue Jays and Exhibition Stadium. All I needed was a bicycle, a five-dollar Safeway bleacher seat and I found myself in the iconic cathedral of the long ball.

I started my own new rituals, like the after-game hotdog from the lovely Jamaican woman’s cart at the corner of Queen and Spadina. I read a box score for the first time. I bought a cap. I read Roger Angell. I became a fan

It was a different kind of fandom from how I saw it in my youth.

The hometown hockey fans:

Yelled coaching instructions from the seats

Got excited by fights

Were often quite verbally abusive

In the first afternoon in the ballpark, I felt the change:

I went all contemplative.

I went all quiet.

I went all hot dog.

I was all fan with none of the fare.

We left Toronto so I had to go cold turkey on big league baseball, but two fine baseball blessings followed.

I discovered the world of small ball, real grass and good seats in Empire Stadium, the Triple A ballpark in Vancouver. It was not so much a cathedral but a fine little neighbourhood church.

Then in 1992, I was in Toronto for graduate studies and on a crazy impulse entered a Toronto Star lottery draw for World Series tickets. I had never won anything before or since but boy oh boy oh boy, I ended up with tickets to all three home World Series games.

I am not a good enough writer to tell you how all that went but sitting in those World Series seats was as good as you might imagine, or better.

I am somewhere in this crowd

I have not been to a major sporting event since. I now live in a city where baseball is considered a bit boring, too long and not enough fights.

Turns out though that my player dreams may not be over. As I step briskly into the last half of my seventies, I happened on a small group of eccentric older guys who play bocce in the back alleys every Sunday afternoon come rain, shine or snowstorm. The balls are pitted, the mitts are fitted and the jokes half witted.

I have grandkids who kick my assets in golf.

After many years I am somewhat back into sport appreciation and now really appreciate the really great aspects of good sport . . . fun, friends and fitness.

Oh yeah, and the Okotoks Dawgs.