Art Nielsen

Art Nielsen (left) instructs teenaged players with Ottawa Canadians.

Arthur Kai Nielsen

Born: 1931
Died: January 10, 2014 (Ottawa)

For more than four decades, Art Nielsen organized, coached and served as an executive for youth sports in Ottawa.

In 1968, he founded a Babe Ruth League (aged 13-15) baseball team. This eventually led to the creation of the Ottawa Canadians baseball program with several teams at different levels. (The team name was chosen because Nielsen was a fan of the NHL Montreal Canadiens.) Nielsen also created a hockey program with the same team name.

He served as president for seven years of the Central Canada Hockey League, a junior-A circuit based in eastern Ontario. In 1985, he received the Sam Pollock Award for outstanding contributions to the league.

He was also honorary president of the Ottawa Sooners junior football club, whose program he helped revitalize in 2006.

Among the players from the Ottawa Canadians program to play professional baseball were major league outfielder Doug Frobel and minor leaguers Dave MacQuarrie, a pitcher, and Phil Franko, a shortstop, according to baseball columnist Bob Elliott, who coached under Nielsen.

A teacher and school principal for 34 years, Nielsen also owned Sport Vision, a sports clothing business. He died of acute myeloid leukemia, aged 83.

Andrew Yeoman

Andrew Yeoman (front row, second from right) was a spare half with Canada’s field hockey team at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

 

Andrew Harry Coltart Yeoman

Born: December 24, 1933 (England)
Died: January 5, 2014 (Central Saanich, B.C.)

 

Andrew Yeoman was a spare half for the Canadian field hockey team at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He was the only player from Calgary on a team comprised mostly of Toronto and Vancouver-area athletes.

Canada finished tied for 13^th with New Zealand in the 15-team tournament, ahead only of Hong Kong, against whom the Canadians recorded their lone victory, by 2-1, against six defeats.

Born in Yorkshire, Yeoman moved with his family to Canada when he was young. The family returned to England after the Second World War, during which his father had served in the Royal Air Force. Yeoman was educated at Gresham’s School at Holt, Norfolk, before earning a geology degree at Clare College, Cambridge.

After a brief time in the oil business in Calgary, he returned to school to become a teacher. He taught through the 1960s between such adventures as the Olympics and traveling the Sahara. He later earned a history master’s degree examining the Pilgrimage of Grace, the 1536 Yorkshire rebellion against Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church.

A decade spent as an investment consultant in the oil and gas industry included co-founding a drilling partnership which discovered the Liege gas field in the Athabasca oilsands area of northern Alberta. 

In 1979, Yeoman and his second wife, Noël Richardson, a librarian and teacher originally from Comox, B.C., moved to Vancouver Island, where they established Ravenhill Herb Farm, a garden on 10 acres of the fertile Saanich Peninsula. Yeoman wrote the introduction to “Summer Delights,” a 1986 cookbook by Richardson and the first of several popular gardening and cooking books. She predeceased him in 2011, aged 73. He leaves two stepdaughters, two step-grandchildren, and a brother.

Doug Hudlin

Douglas Hudlin

Born: December 12, 1922 (Victoria, B.C.)
Died: January 5, 2014 (Victoria, B.C.)

Member: Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame (1998)

 

Doug Hudlin, known as the Gentleman Umpire, was the best-known baseball arbiter on Vancouver Island, working senior leagues but primarily known for his work with children and teenagers. He was a mentor to fellow umpires on the island.

Hudlin is credited as the first non-American umpire to work the Little League World Series held at Williamsport, Pa., which he did in 1967 and 1974. He also twice umpired at the Senior Little League World Series at Gary, Ind.

He began umpiring in 1954, working behind the plate for more than 30 years, where he was known for “good humour, sense of fair play and (a) gentle approach to the game,” according to the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. “He had the rare gift of being able to control a game without creating ill will.”

Hudlin was a founder and served as first president of the B.C. Baseball Umpires Association, a position he held from 1974 to 1979. He was inducted into the association’s hall of fame in 2011. The umpires present a Doug Hudlin Distinguished Service Award each year to an umpire in British Columbia.

Away from the diamond, Hudlin was a founding director of the B.C. Black History Awareness Society.

Hudlin was the great grandson of Nancy and Charles Alexander, who arrived in Victoria in 1858 and who started a farm in what is now the suburb of Saanich. They had six children and 21 grandchildren and the Alexander name remains prominent on the south Island. Hudlin prepared a family tree in the mid-1990s, recording more than 400 descendents, among them Kevin Alexander, the great lacrosse star.

In 2011, Hudlin was given the honour of introducing Ferguson Jenkins, the first Canadian inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, at a public event in Victoria.

Hudlin’s father worked as a shoeshine man in the basement of the Empress Hotel, where he was not permitted to pass through the lobby. Dances were segregated, as was Chrystal Pool. Like others, Hudlin found on the baseball diamond a venue where the only colour that mattered was the one on the uniform.

“Everything was baseball,” he once told me, “once you were on the field.”

A sandlot team in Victoria included several descendants of the Alexander Family. Doug Hudlin is in the back row, second from the left.

 

Bill Murphy (left) and Chuck Blaikie (right) present Doug Hudlin with a plaque on his induction into the B.C. Baseball Umpires Association hall of fame in 2011.

 

Don Ward

Donald Joseph Ward

Born: October 19, 1935 (Sarnia, Ontario)
Died: January 6, 2014 (Shoreline, Washington)

 

The journeyman defenceman Don Ward had two cups of coffee in the NHL before settling in on the blue line with the Seattle Totems. He skated 11 seasons for the Totems as part of a defensive corps known as the Jolly Green Giants for their sweaters. With Ward anchoring the defence, when he was not in the penalty box, the Totems won Western Hockey League championships in 1967 and ’68.

The 6-foot-2, 200-pounder played a season of junior hockey in his hometown with the Sarnia Legionnnaires. He was playing senior hockey with the Windsor Bulldogs in 1956-57 when he joined the Buffalo Bisons of the American Hockey League. He was with the Bisons the following season when he got a three-game tryout with the Chicago Black Hawks.

Ward divided the 1958-59 season between the Victoria Cougars and Calgary Stampeders of the WHL. In the summer of 1959, the Boston Bruins claimed him in the inter-league draft and he joined a rearguard brigade including Fern Flaman, Larry Hillman, Dale Rolfe, Dallas Smith and Doug Mohns. Seeing spot action over 31 games, Ward recorded a single assist, while being slapped with 16 penalty minutes. In mid-January, 1960, he was sent down to the Bruins AHL farm club, the Providence Reds.

After a season with the WHL’s Winnipeg Warriors, the Bruins traded Ward’s rights to Portland of the WHL, who soon after traded him to Seattle, where he adopted a more pugnacious style of play than before.

“I didn’t run all over the place, but if they came near me, I took them out,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2006. “If they were looking for me, I wasn’t too hard to find.”

The bashing blue-liner became a fan favourite in Seattle. Over 11 seasons, he scored 32 goals and added 142 assists. But he more often appeared in the scoresheet in the punishment section, as he served 1,110 minutes in the penalty box for the Totems.

He suffered plenty of ordinary hockey injuries in his career — broken ankle, separated shoulder, surgically-repaired knees, three disks removed from his neck — but it was during a game with Buffalo where he learned a painful lesson about hockey’s brutal ways.

“We were playing Rochester and a guy challenged me,” he told the Seattle newspaper. “I was a young kid and I dropped my stick first and was ready to fight. He two-handed me with his stick, knocking out five or six teeth across the front. I always kept a piece of wood in my hands after that.”

The defenceman was released by the Totems after the team lost a 10-1 exhibition game against the parent Vancouver Canucks in September, 1972.

The Los Angeles Sharks had claimed Ward in the World Hockey Association’s inaugural player draft that summer, so he spent the 1972-73 season, his final campaign in pro hockey, with the Sharks farm club, the Greensboro (N.C.) Generals of the Eastern Hockey League.

He was a supervisor for many years at Ellstrom Manufacturing, a veneer and plywood maker, in Ballard, Wash., retiring in 2006.

A son, Joe Ward, was selected 22^nd overall in the 1980 NHL entry draft by Colorado. The centreman played in four games with the Rockies in 1980-81 without recording any points.

Ward leaves Anne, his wife of 57 years; son Joe; two grandsons; and, two sisters. He was predeceased by three sisters and a daughter, who died in 1978, aged 21.

Len Winchester

Leonard Winchester

Born: February 13, 1917 (Verdun, Quebec)
Died: January 6, 2014 (Long Sault, Ontario)

Member: Cornwall (Ont.) Sports Hall of Fame (1972)

Len Winchester pitched his amateur Cornwall (Ont.) Legion softball team to the Eastern Ontario title over Brockville in 1950, winning both games of the finals. His throwing helped the Legion win three consecutive North End and city championships in Cornwall. He was named league most valuable player in 1949. Winchester served as an instrument mechanic in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later earned his living as a stockbroker. 

Cal Swenson

Calvin Berle Swenson

Born: April 16, 1948 (Watson, Saskatchewan)
Died: January 1, 2014 (Stony Plain, Alberta)

 

Cal Swenson was an original member of the Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association.

In 102 games over two seasons with the Jets, Swenson scored 12 goals and added 25 assists. In 1973, he skated in all 14 Jets playoff games, scoring a lone goal to go with five assists, as the Jets lost the Avco Cup finals to the New England Whalers.

He was signed by the fledgling club after spending four seasons with the Tulsa Oilers of the Central Hockey League, where he had seasons of 11, 18, 27 and 35 goals. In 1970, he once scored a hat-trick in the first 5:57 of play, only to watch as the Oilers lost the game, 4-3, to the Kansas City Blues. His NHL rights were owned by the Toronto Maple Leafs at the time he signed with the rival WHA.

The 5-foot-8, 175-pound forward played his junior hockey with the Melville (Sask.) Millionaires, the Brandon (Man.) Wheat Kings and the Flin Flon (Man.) Bombers.

After his stint with the Jets, Swenson, known as a stylish playmaker, concluded his playing career in the American Hockey League with the Jacksonville (Ala.) Barons and Syracuse (N.Y.) Eagles.

In his first season in civvies, Swenson coached the Amarillo (Tex.) Wranglers to the championship of the Southwest Hockey League, a six-team senior amateur circuit.

Swenson died suddenly on New Year’s Day. He was 65.

Paul Coté

Paul Thomas Côté II

Born: January 28, 1944 (Vancouver)
Died: July 19, 2013 (Vancouver)

As a law student in Vancouver in the 1960s, Paul Côté immersed himself in protests against nuclear testing in Alaska, eventually becoming one of the founders of the group later known as Greenpeace. He missed the protesters’ famous voyage to the test zone because he was training for the Olympics as a sailor.

He returned from the 1972 Summer Olympics with a bronze medal, Canada’s first medal in the sport in four decades, which he presented to a baby daughter born while he was overseas.

Mr. Côté, who died July 19 in Vancouver at the age of 69, enjoyed success as a businessman and as a sportsman, where he earned a reputation for rigorous dedication to sailing at such regattas as the Swiftsure in Juan de Fuca Strait and the gruelling Victoria-to-Maui race.

“He was bright, strong, tough,” said David Miller of Vancouver, the skipper of his Olympic sailboat. “He had all the ingredients of a good crewman.”

Paul Thomas Côté II was born in Vancouver on Jan. 28, 1944, one of eight children of Elizabeth (née Anderson) and an engineer father after whom he was named. After attending Vancouver College, a Catholic all-boys school, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, where he was pledged to the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

In October, 1969, the campus roiled with anger over a planned nuclear test on one of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. (An earlier test, in 1965, had generated little concern.) The student union hired buses to join a caravan of private vehicles to the Douglas border crossing south of Vancouver for a protest.

Buoyed by the turnout but disappointed at the protest’s ineffectiveness, seven people formed a group to challenge the next nuclear test, scheduled to be held on Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands in 1971. The group called itself the Don’t Make A Wave Committee, the name a pun about activism that also captured the fear that the underground nuclear explosions might cause a tsunami.

Mr. Côté was one of the three original directors of this group, which later became known as Greenpeace. The others were Jim Bohlen, an American-born engineer and Quaker, and Irving Stowe, a fellow Quaker and American who had abandoned his family name of Strasmich to honour Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The group’s meetings were held at Irving and Dorothy Stowe’s home in the leafy Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey.

It was Marie Bohlen, Jim’s wife, who suggested the group sail a boat to the test zone. The protest would be an aquatic version of a sit-in that would also fulfill the Quaker tradition of bearing witness.

Mr. Côté’s knowledge of watercraft led to his being assigned the unenviable task of finding a vessel for Greenpeace’s quixotic protest. He had been a sailor since childhood and his family were long-time members of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

His background did not make the search any easier. “We wrote to everyone we could think of who might lend or charter to us,” he told a reporter at the time. “Everything’s fine until you tell them you’re going to the hydrogen bomb blast in Amchitka.”

He eventually found a halibut seiner docked on the Fraser River whose captain, John Cormack, agreed to charter the ecology-minded peaceniks to Alaska on a six-week mission for $12,000. The fishing boat, named the Phyllis Cormack, was renamed Greenpeace for the voyage.

The charter was financed through a benefit concert featuring Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Phil Ochs and popular local band Chilliwack.

In the end, Mr. Côté did not sail aboard the Greenpeace to the test zone, as he was in training by then for the Olympics.

In 1968, he sailed as one of four crewmen under his father’s command aboard Jeunesse, the family’s 35-foot sloop, in the inaugural Victoria-to-Maui International Yacht Race. Starting at Brotchie Ledge Light in Juan de Fuca Strait south of Victoria at 10 a.m. on Dominion Day, the Jeunesse was one of 14 vessels to hoist spinnakers in a race across 2,308 nautical miles (4,274 kilometres) of open Pacific Ocean. The Vancouver crew finished first in their division.

Mr. Côté soon after teamed up with Mr. Miller, a two-time Olympian from Vancouver who was a fellow member of the yacht club as well as a fraternity brother. With John Ekels as helmsmen, the three raced in the Soling class, a fin-keel sloop which was to make its Olympic debut in 1972.

After modest success, the trio realized they would need a new, faster vessel if they were to compete for a medal. With financing from Vancouver yachtsman Bob Brodie, who made a fortune in the local gas-station business, they ordered a new vessel from famed boat builder Bill Abbott of Sarnia, Ont. This sailboat was named Terrestrial New World Cuckoo Two, a moniker dreamed up by Mr. Côté, who had affixed a decal of a cartoon roadrunner on the original ship of that name.

The Miller-skippered sailboat finished fifth in the world Soling championship held on Long Island Sound in 1971, a pre-Olympic regatta won by Robert Mosbacher of Houston, who later became commerce secretary in U.S. president George H. W. Bush’s administration.

(The week-long sailing competition ended 16 days after the Greenpeace departed its berth at False Creek in Vancouver.)

The following year, the B.C. sailors crushed all opposition at the Canadian Olympic trials off Halifax, winning all eight races.

The sailing competitions for the 1972 Olympics were held in Kiel harbour and included a crew skippered by Crown Prince Harald (now Harald V) of Norway.

The six-race Soling contest was completed under heavy security following a terrorist attack in which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed. The favoured Buddy Melges of Wisconsin won the gold medal, followed by a crew from Sweden, while the Canadians claimed the bronze, the first Olympic sailing medal for Canada in 40 years.

After completing a law degree, Mr. Côté served as an executive with California-based land development company Genstar USA. In 1987, he joined with several fellow executives to form a San Diego-based company called the Newland Group, which purchased the assets of Genstar USA, including 14,000 acres of land in five states.

Mr. Côté was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia a decade ago.

He leaves Christine Lundgren, his second wife, whom he married 21 years ago; three adult children – Christine Haun, Elise Rollinson and Paul Côté III – from his first marriage to Colleen Badger, which ended in divorce in 1990; three grandchildren; two brothers; four sisters; and his mother, Elizabeth, known as Bette.

He was predeceased by his father, a former chancellor of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., who died in 2010. He was also predeceased in 2006 by his sister Ann Elizabeth Black, known as Annabeth, the wife of prominent Victoria newspaper owner David Black.

In 1989, Mr. Côté and the Olympic crew were inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. Mr. Côté’s daughter Christine Haun said the red Olympics blazer he received in 1972 was important to him, a reminder of his success on the sea against the world’s best.

“He could look at the stars,” Ms. Haun said, “and tell you where you were in the world.”

Epy Guerrero

Epifanio Obdulio Guerrero Abud

Born: January 3, 1942 (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
Died: May 23, 2013 (Sato Domingo, Dominican Republic)

 

The baseball scout Epy Guerrero plucked from the sun-baked fields of Caribbean islands a bounteous crop of slick infielders, power-hitting outfielders and heat-throwing pitchers.

Mr. Guerrero, who has died at 71, delivered an all-star roster of players to the major leagues. For 17 years, he was chief Latin American scout for the Toronto Blue Jays, and it was his learned and savvy eye that brought the likes of George Bell, Kelvim Escobar and Carlos Delgado to the team.

Known for his work ethic and dedication, the scout was not above calling upon subterfuge and legerdemain when needed.

He hiked up mountainsides and rode donkeys to check out athletes, and is said to have once dressed as a soldier to slip a prospect out of Nicaragua.

One of his more famous capers involved a beanpole boy who showed soft hands in the field and a lashing stroke at the plate. The youth was so poor he could not afford a glove, so had fashioned a cardboard milk carton around his left hand to cushion the sting of sharp grounders. His prospects were dimmed by a deal-breaking – and very noticeable – flaw. He walked with a pronounced limp.

Mr. Guerrero sent the boy away for surgery to remove a bone chip in his right knee. For the first time since childhood, the boy walked and ran without a hobble. The scout signed him to the Blue Jays. “The other scouts thought I was crazy,” Mr. Guerrero told the Washington Post in 1986. “They didn’t know that the boy had had surgery, so they told me I had just signed a tullido, a cripple. But I knew better.” That boy was Tony Fernandez, who went on to become a keystone player for the Blue Jays, winning four consecutive Gold Glove Awards as the American League’s best fielding shortstop.

Mr. Guerrero was a legendary scout, even rating a profile in People magazine. He was responsible for signing 52 players who wound up playing in the major leagues, according to the scouts committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2008, his scouting peers named him International Scout of the Year, only the second time such a citation had been made. That same year, he was inducted into the national sports hall of fame in his native Dominican Republic.

Despite the honours, Mr. Guerrero felt baseball did not sufficiently recognize the contributions of scouts.

“Without us, there is no professional baseball,” he told the Los Angeles Times four years ago. “Despite that, we’ve been ignored for so many years.”

A baseball scout’s unique skill comes in evaluating raw, unfinished talent and determining a player’s likely future performance. It is more educated guesswork than science, as if a wine connoisseur had to evaluate a vintage before it ferments.

That Mr. Guerrero had such success is all the more remarkable for his own failed career as a player.

Epifanio Obdulio Guerrero Abud was born in the capital city of Santo Domingo on Jan. 3, 1942, the second of six sons born to Epifanio Sr. and Patria Abud. In a poor land struggling under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, the Guerrero family ran a grocery business. The many sons provided free labour, a job that included the hauling of sacks of sugar heavier than themselves.

“That’s why I am so strong,” Mr. Guerrero told People magazine. “When I’m 18, I work 8 to 6 in my father’s store. From 7 to 10 I go to school. I come home and sleep until 3, when I get up to march around in Trujillo’s army. Ever since, I only need four hours sleep.”

The brothers Guerrero played together on a team sponsored by the family business. In time, Epy was signed to the Milwaukee Braves system by John Mullen, the club’s farm director. Young Mr. Guerrero, a 5-foot-11, 165-pound utility player, spent parts of two seasons at the lowest level of the minor leagues, in Wellsville, N.Y., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He hit a miserable .188 in 32 games before returning to his homeland. (A younger brother, Mario, would later spend eight seasons in the majors.)

In 1967, Mr. Guerrero helped the Houston Astros sign a 16-year-old prospect from Santo Domingo whose speed, glove and swing would lead to comparisons with Willie Mays. The signing of César Cedeño led to the Astros hiring Mr. Guerrero as a scout. It also marked the start of a fruitful collaboration with baseball executive Pat Gillick, whom Mr. Guerrero would follow to jobs with the New York Yankees and, most successfully, the Blue Jays, including the World Series championship teams of 1992 and 1993.

Some star players, such as Mr. Fernandez, the all-star shortstop, came directly to the Blue Jays from Mr. Guerrero’s scouting. Others, such as the slugging outfielder George Bell, who was named American League Most Valuable Player in 1987, were scooped by the Jays in a draft on the scout’s recommendation after being made available by other teams.

Mr. Guerrero built an athletic complex on an isolated farm in his homeland where young players learned the fundamentals of the game away from the prying eyes of rival scouts. The academy provided a steady supply of baseball talent.

After Mr. Gillick left the Blue Jays, Mr. Guerrero had a falling-out with his successor, completing his career as a scout with the Milwaukee Brewers.

The man known in Latin America as “El supereschucha” (Superscout) died in Santo Domingo of kidney failure on May 23. He leaves his wife, Rosario (née Jiménez), five sons, five brothers, and his 102-year-old father.

The Blue Jays held a moment of silence for the scout before the first pitch of the game against the Baltimore Orioles played on the day of his death. Several Blue Jays players inscribed their caps with chalk reading, “R.I.P EPY.”

Originally published in the The Globe and Mail on June 4, 2013.

Nora McDermott

Nora June McDermott

Born: June 25, 1927 (Vancouver)
Died: May 16, 2013 (North Vancouver, B.C.)

 

Nora McDermott powered a basketball dynasty with dead-eye shooting from anywhere on the court.

Ms. McDermott, who has died at 85, was one of Canada’s finest athletes in the post-Second World War years, leading the Vancouver Eilers to nine consecutive national titles in the 1950s. She represented Canada at three Pan American Games as a player and once as team manager.

A versatile athlete, she also won two national championships as a volleyball player.

Quiet and unassuming, she inspired generations of students as a high-school teacher and coach in Vancouver.

Nora June McDermott was born in Vancouver on June 25, 1927, to Frances Margaret (née Harrison), a domestic, and Hugh Joachim McDermott, a lather and plasterer. When construction jobs disappeared during the Depression, her father walked from the family’s east side home to downtown to collect relief. His youngest daughter relied on shoes provided by charity; her long, slender feet made a perfect fit unlikely, so more often she wore shoes that pinched at the heel and toe.

Nora did not take up basketball until Grade 11. She twisted both ankles in one game, so her friends placed her atop a bicycle before rolling her to a bus stop. She wound up crawling the last few blocks home.

She graduated from John Oliver High, where she would later join the teaching staff.

At the University of British Columbia, she qualified for the Thunderettes varsity basketball team in her first year, guiding the team to several tournament championships as well as two city titles over four years. Her skill in the gym was matched by her prowess on the grass pitch, as she also played field hockey.

Ms. McDermott graduated at the top of her class in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. She earned six varsity letters, known at the university as Big Blocks, making her the university’s most decorated woman athlete. Seven years later, she added an education degree to her resumé.

Her university coach, Ruth Wilson, took up the reins of a women’s team sponsored by local jeweller Walter Eilers, a recent arrival in Vancouver from Saskatchewan who financed several sports teams to get his name before the public.

Led by Ms. McDermott’s terrific shooting, the Eilers claimed their first Dominion championship in 1950 by defeating the Montgomery Maids in games at Parkdale Collegiate in Toronto.

Reporters marvelled at her fierce determination on the court. In a game to determine the provincial champion in 1953, Miss McDermott, “still limping badly with a knee injury, was a power with some dead-eye shooting,” the Vancouver Sun reported. She led her squad with 19 points in a game against Victoria.

The Eilers dominated women’s basketball for a decade, knocking off such challengers as the Saskatoon Aces, the Hamilton Zion Ramblers, the Calgary Wittichens and the Kitchener-Waterloo Elliotts. More often than not, Ms. McDermott, a quicksilver forward, led the Eilers in scoring.

“She didn’t look like she could do anything,” said Barbara (Bim) Schrodt, a sports historian who has been inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame for her contributions to field hockey. “Slim build. About 5-foot-10. Not husky. What could she do? Well, score baskets.”

The Eilers, which included on the roster Nora’s elder sister Louise, played a sophisticated style of basketball, which often left their Eastern rivals confused.

“We did perfectly legal screens and they were blocked out,” Ms. McDermott once told Ms. Schrodt. “They had never seen those things before.”

After the Eilers’ streak ended, Ms. McDermott won a tenth national championship in 1962 with the Richmond Merchants, a team comprised mostly of former Eilers players.

She played for Canada at the Pan American Games in 1955, 1959 and 1963, although her teams failed to finish higher than fourth. She did manage the team that claimed a bronze medal at the 1967 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg.

In the 1960s, she took up volleyball, winning national championships with the Vancouver Alums team in 1964 and 1966.

Ms. McDermott taught at John Oliver for 15 years before becoming an original staff member at Eric Hamber Secondary when the school opened in 1962. She was the first woman to head a physical education department at a Vancouver school, a position she kept for a quarter-century, until retiring in 1987. For most of those years, she coached at least three school teams.

Her final managerial stint came in handling a team of players aged over 65 known as the Retreads, who were featured in a documentary titled The Oldest Basketball Team in the World.

She skied until a few years ago, joining Alums teammate Mary Macdonald on black-diamond runs at Whistler.

Ms. McDermott has been inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame (1991), the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame (1996), and the University of British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame (1998).

She died at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver on May 16. She leaves two nieces and two nephews. She was predeceased by two sisters.

Originally published in The Globe and Mail on May 27, 2013.

Vancouver Eilers

Karen Muir

Karen Yvette Muir

Born: September 16, 1952 (Kimberley, South  Africa)
Died: April 2, 2013 (Mossel Bay, South Africa)

 

Karen Muir went from an unknown schoolgirl to global sporting fame in less than 69 seconds.

The unheralded athlete shocked the sports establishment in 1965 by swimming a 110-yard backstroke in 1 minute, 8.7 seconds, a women’s world record. The record seemed all the more unlikely for having been set in a heat for girls. She was only 12 years old.

The prodigy was hailed as the youngest to have set a world record in any sport.

“Now all I want to do is to forget all the fuss and get back to my schoolwork,” she said at the time.

She would be credited with 17 world records in a brief but spectacular five-year competitive swimming career, though one ambition was forever beyond her grasp. The young South African was barred from competing in the Olympics owing to her country’s policy of racial apartheid. She retired while still a teenager.

She became a doctor, practising in Africa before moving to Canada in 2000. She was a popular and well-liked family practitioner in Vanderhoof in the British Columbia Interior. Dr. Muir, who was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, died on April 2 in her native South Africa. She was 60.

An unassuming but intense competitor, the quiet, freckle-faced athlete with icy blue eyes cared little for the public glare. Sportswriters described her as “shy, sensitive” and, unkindly, as “solemn and rather gawky.” They called the thin, “leggy” swimmer the Timid Torpedo.

For several years, her great rival in the pool was Elaine Tanner, the teenage swimming sensation from Canada who was older by 18 months. The pair contested and exchanged world record titles in one of the sport’s great rivalries.

“I’m heartbroken,” Ms. Tanner said when informed of her rival’s death. “It’s like a piece of me has died, too.

“She was very quiet, very reserved. That was her nature. She let her performance speak for her.”

Karen Yvette Muir was born on Sept. 16, 1952, to a doctor and his wife at Kimberley, the diamond centre and a provincial capital in South Africa.

The Grade 5 student at Diamantveld Laerskool (Diamond Fields primary school) was thrust into the spotlight at the British national championship swim meet on Aug. 10, 1965.

Karen had travelled to England to gain experience in international competition and was not regarded by the South African entourage as a medal hopeful. It was thought she needed to do work on her turns, which were slow and awkward.

In a heat for the girls’ 110-yard event, she gained an eight-yard margin on her closest competitor by the midway point. She touched the wall in world-record time, shaving eight-tenths of a second off the previous world mark, set by Linda Ludgrove of Britain only a fortnight earlier.

Karen Muir was 12 years, 10 months, 25 days old; it was a stunning achievement for one so young. The crowd at the Derby Baths in Blackpool roared their approval for the precocious swimmer.

Beneath the stands, a young Elaine Tanner was surprised by the tumult.

“It sounded like a stampede up there,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Who would break a world record in an age-group event? Oh my god, who is this girl?’ ”

The world asked the same question. In the race of a lifetime, she had knocked more than two seconds – an eternity in the pool – off her previous best time.

The taciturn athlete faced gauntlets of reporters in Britain and at home, a tribulation that left her in tears.

“It has been a bit too much and I still cannot really believe that I am holder of the world record,” she told the Sunday Times of Johannesburg in her homeland. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Everyone has been very kind and wonderful but I am glad that the fuss is finished.”

She could not have been more mistaken. The South African remained in the headlines for the next five years, as she rewrote the backstroke book, setting new imperial and metric standards. The schoolgirl lowered the world record in the 110- and 220-yards, as well as in the 100- and 200-metres. At one point, she held the world record in all four of those lengths. She also set the standard for the 440-yard individual medley.

Meanwhile, Miss Tanner was also setting world records in the backstroke. She established a mark of 1:07.1 in the 100-metres backstroke at the Pan American Games in Winnipeg in 1967, only to have the South African better it the following year.

The final world mark set by Ms. Muir in 1969 of 1:05.6 would last more than four years before being bettered by Ulrike Richter of East Germany. (Many years later, officials confessed in German court to having administered performance-enhancing drugs to Ms. Richter and other East German swimmers.)

At a swim meet in Vancouver in 1966, Ms. Tanner and Ms. Muir were named joint holders of a world record in the 220-yard individual medley. The race featured the oddity of judges determining Ms. Tanner had finished first, while timers recorded Ms. Muir touching the wall one-10th of a second faster. Under international rules, the record was shared, based on average times.

“That’s fine by me,” Ms. Tanner said after the race.

“That’s okay,” Ms. Muir agreed.

The Canadian travelled to South Africa with three other swimmers early in 1968 to compete in a 17-day tour of invitational meets against her “friendly rival” at Bloemfontein, Kimberley and Cape Town.

By the time she was 15, the young South African stood 5 foot 7 with a physique so lean she was called Bamboo. Her Canadian rival, nicknamed Mighty Mouse, stood barely five feet tall.

“We looked like Mutt and Jeff together,” Ms. Tanner said recently.

In April, 1968, the International Olympic Committee withdrew an invitation to South Africa to compete at the Summer Games in Mexico City. The teen swimmer had been touted as a possible Olympic gold medalist. Instead, she was forced to skip the competition, during which her Canadian counterpart gained a pair of silvers and a bronze medal.

Ms. Muir retired from the pool in 1970, shortly after her 18th birthday. She enrolled at the University of the Free State at Bloemfontein, graduating in 1977 with a medical degree. She practised medicine in South Africa for two decades before moving with her physician husband to Leader, Sask., in 2000, soon after relocating to Vanderhoof, a district municipality of about 4,500 in B.C.’s Nechako Valley.

“Canada seemed like a good option work-wise,” her son, Jan, said.

She established a family practice in Vanderhoof and was also associated with a cancer clinic that opened at St. John Hospital in 2008. She received her own diagnosis of breast cancer the following year.

In 2010, she wrote a thank-you letter to the local Omineca Express newspaper after a round of treatment. “I have never experienced support like this before,” she wrote. “I am thrilled to be in good health, back home and at work again.”

Newspapers in South Africa reported she died at her sister’s home at Mossel Bay, South Africa. The pages of Afrikaans-language newspapers were filled with tributes to “die Suid-Afrikaanse swemlegende.”

She leaves daughters Ann-Mari Joyce, Karike Human and Marietjie de Graad, all of South Africa; a son, Jan de Graad, of Vancouver; a granddaughter, Jenna Joyce; and sisters Linda van der Linde and Liana Barrett, both of South Africa. She also leaves her husband, Dr. Gerben de Graad, of Peace River, Alta., from whom she was separated.

Dr. Muir rarely spoke of her swimming exploits, not even to friends with whom she joined in a team endurance competition.

“Karen never said anything about it,” said Claire Radcliffe, a friend. “She would never, ever think of bragging. It was never about her.”

In 1980, Dr. Muir was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the first South African swimmer to receive the honour. She has also been enshrined in the South African Sports and Arts Hall of Fame. As well, the pool in her hometown of Kimberley bears her name.

Originally published by The Globe and Mail on April 23, 2013.

 

 

 

 

Karen Muir (right) catches a post-race breather with her friend, Elaine Tanner of Canada (centre).