Dick Ball

Murray Dowey’s head was pasted atop Dick Ball’s body (front row, far left) in the official photograph of the 1948 RCAF Flyers.

Richard Alan Ball
Born: January 17, 1926 (Toronto)
Died: December 21, 2014 (Toronto)

Dick Ball was one of the finest amateur goaltenders in the land when he was parachuted onto a Royal Canadian Air Force hockey team designated to represent Canada at the 1948 Olympics.

Ball was a last-minute reinforcement as the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association feared the RCAF squad might do poorly against European competition.

The 5-foot-7, 155-pound goalie was playing for the Maher Shoes team in the industrial Toronto Hockey League when selected for the RCAF Flyers. Earlier in 1947, his solid netminding led the Varsity Blues of the University of Toronto to the intercollegiate championship. The Blues were coached by former NHL player Ace Bailey.

Ball was ordered to report to the team on Dec. 31, 1947, and to prepare to sail from New York to Europe on Jan. 9. Three days before departure, Ball failed a medical examination. A spot on a lung in an X-ray suggested he was suffering from a lung condition. He was grounded and off the team.

“Disaster struck at Canada’s Olympic hockey team, the RCAF Flyers, almost on the eve of their departure overseas,” the Canadian Press reported.

The Flyers called on Murray Dowey, a 22-year-old Toronto bus driver, to be Ball’s replacement. The Flyers, who had a dreadful pre-tournament record, which explains why Ball and other non-military personnel were recruited to the team, went on to win the Olympic gold medal on an outdoor rink at St. Moritz, Switzerland.

The roster change happened so late that the Flyers’ official team photograph was doctored by the RCAF so that Dowey’s head was pasted onto Ball’s body.

Meanwhile, young Ball feared he might have tuberculosis. Further tests revealed he was in perfect health, but by then the team had set sail for Europe and glory. He could only wonder what might have been.

Ball enlisted in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve from April, 1944, until November, 1945. He served aboard HMCS Canso, a Bangor-class minesweeper, seeing action in the waters of the English Channel and the North Sea,

Ball led his Maher Shoes team to the league championship in 1948-49 before launching a career as a sales and marketing executive. He married Claire Thomson, his university sweetheart, and they raised three sons and a daughter. They all survive him, as do 10 grandchildren.

Hans Fogh

Hans Fogh (red jacket) with crew John Kerr and Steve Calder won a Soling bronze medal at 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

 

Hans Marius Fogh
Born: March 8, 1938 (Rødovre, Denmark)
Died: March 14, 2014 (Toronto)

Member:
Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame (1985)
Canadian Amateur Sports Hall of Fame (1986)
Etobicoke (Ont.) Sports Hall of Fame (1996) 

 

 

By Tom Hawthorn
The Globe and Mail, April 12, 2014

 

The yacht Canada II had a healthy lead on an American boat in the sea off Fremantle, Australia, when the wind ripped a four-metre tear in the mainsail.

The sail needed a fix on the fly. Hans Fogh, the crew’s navigator and tactician, climbed into the bosun’s chair before being hauled up near the end of the boom, where he used needle and thread in a desperate bid to repair the sail.

The sailmaker’s dramatic efforts in the midst of a race kept the yacht competitive, though it lost by 66 seconds on the opening day of the America’s Cup yachting series in 1986.

Fogh was 48 years old that day and he remained a competitive sailor for nearly three more decades before dying in Toronto in March, aged 76.

The sailor was a six-time Olympian and a two-time medal winner, claiming a silver for his native Denmark in 1960 and a bronze for his adopted land of Canada in 1984. The 24-year stretch between a first and second medal is the longest in Olympic history.

Praised as a cool and practical sailor, Fogh won four world championships (twice each in the Soling and Flying Dutchman classes), four European championships (three Soling, one Flying Dutchman), and four North American championships (all Soling), the most recent of those coming in 2013 on Lake Champlain near Plattsburgh, N.Y. He also won races aboard Finns, Stars and Etchells.

An ambitious competitor on the water, Fogh’s technical expertise made him a force on land. Soon after arriving in Canada, he created a sail for the prototype of a new dinghy designed by Canadians Bruce Kirby and Ian Bruce. The Laser, as it was eventually named, is a one-person craft whose simplicity and popularity led to its own introduction into Olympic competition.

A compact, diminutive figure at 5-foot-7 (1.71-metres), Fogh showed daring at sea.

“He was a risk taker,” said John Kerr of Midland, Ont., who joined Fogh and Steve Calder in winning a bronze medal in Soling at the 1984 Olympics. “There was nothing he wouldn’t try on a boat to make it go faster.”

Fogh displayed an enviable ability to assess three dimensions while sailing, Kerr said, calculating strategy even as he evaluated the wind in the sails, the waves against the boat, and the force of the current underneath.

“He was a gifted downwind sailor,” said Calder. “He had a feel for the boat and a nose for the wind like no one else.”

Hans Marius Fogh was born on March 8, 1938, at Rødovre, a Danish town outside Copenhagen. As a boy, he spent summers at a cottage owned by relatives. “I was always playing with my boats in the water and going out on the boat with my aunt and uncle, so even at a young age I felt that someday I would have a career on the water,” he once told the sports writer Bob Duff. He graduated from a rowboat to a sailboat and at age 17 bought his first dinghy with money earned from working as a gardener in the family’s greenhouse.

When he needed a new sail, his father bought some from Paul Elvstrøm, an Olympian who had just launched his own sailmaking company. The younger Fogh joined Elvstrøm’s firm in 1960, becoming a protege of the Danish sporting legend.

Both men competed in the Olympic regatta that year in the Bay of Naples. The owner won a gold medal for a fourth consecutive Olympics. Competing in a different class, Fogh made his Olympic debut as helmsman of Skum, a Flying Dutchman with Ole Erik Gunnar Petersen as crew. The Danish duo won two of seven races to claim the silver medal behind a Norwegian boat.

In 1962, Fogh, “a fresh-faced and gee-whiz sailor” in the words of one of his competitors, took the tiller while his boss handled tactics and wind shifts as the crewman in the Flying Dutchman world championship. Reporters covering the regatta on Tampa Bay off St. Petersburg, Fla., noted the six-year-old Danish boat looked “battered, beaten and nicked with shell ice marks from winter sailing.” The third of seven races took place in gusting winds, causing six of 19 boats to topple into the choppy waters. The Danes held off a challenge from an Australian boat to claim the world title.

“I have never seen a Dutchman as fast as the Australian boat, but their tactics were poor,” Fogh told Sports Illustrated magazine after the race. “The race was our good tactics against their fast boat.”

Fogh returned to the Olympics in 1964, guiding Miss Denmark 1964 to victory in the the fourth of seven races in Sagami Bay off the coast of Japan. The Danes finished fourth in the competition.

The Danish sailor withdrew in the midst of the 1968 Olympic regatta on Acapulco Bay to return home following the death of his father. Four years later, he finished a disappointing seventh in Kiel, Germany, his last of four Olympics representing his homeland and by which time he was living in Toronto.

When not on the water, Fogh continued working at Elvstrøm Sails, becoming a production manager before wanderlust and a desire to be his own boss brought him to Canada.

Paul Henderson, a Toronto sailor and Olympian, had urged Mr. Fogh to immigrate, partly out of friendship and partly out of self-interest. The high quality sails needed for racing were not made here, so Canadians bought them in the United States before smuggling them across the border to avoid an onerous duty tax. A domestic manufacturer was needed.

In his eulogy for Fogh, Mr. Henderson told a story about the Danish sailor’s immigration interview. The officer asked, “Mr. Fogh, how are you going to earn a living in Canada?”

“Sailmaker,” he replied.

“Sale maker? Canada has no need of those,” the officer replied.

Henderson piped up. “Sailmaker.”

“Oh, Mr. Fogh,” the officer said, “Canada has no category for that.”

Henderson then said the young would-be immigrant had been an apprentice gardener in his native land.

“Gardener!” exclaimed the officer. “Canada needs those.”

Fogh opened a loft in a former ski-jacket factory on Pelham Avenue in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. He sewed Elvstrøm sails and designed a sail of his own for the Laser, the new dinghy which he also tested on the water. Its success contributed to the growth of his company and became a landmark in the development of the domestic marine manufacturing industry. The addition of the Laser class to the Olympic lineup in 1996 only added to the popularity of the craft. Fogh also designed the Laser Radial, a smaller version he originally intended for his son’s use which is now the model used by women in the Olympics.

Over time, the company name became Fogh Sails and, later, North Sails Fogh Ltd.

The yachtsman continued to compete for Denmark while living in Canada, claiming a second Flying Dutchman world title in 1973 and a Soling world championship the following year.

After he gained Canadian citizenship in 1975, Fogh became a member of the national team as Canada prepared to play host to its first Summer Games. In May, 1976, Fogh joined with Evert Bastet, a Venezuelan-born sailor who had moved to Quebec as a boy, in winning the European Flying Dutchman championship at Hyères, France. The victory came in dramatic fashion, as the Canadian sailors jumped from third to first place with a victory in the final race.

The triumph was promising coming just three months before the Olympic regatta on Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont. With a home country cheering for Canadian medals, the Flying Dutchman sailors were in contention for a podium finish going into the final race. A poor, sixth-place finish in the last event allowed a Brazilian boat to slip ahead for a bronze medal. With Canada boycotting the 1980 Moscow Games, Fogh had eight long years to contemplate a disappointing fourth-place finish.

By 1984, Fogh had moved into a larger craft. He was skipper of a Soling crew with Kerr and Calder in the Pacific Ocean off Long Beach, Calif. They won the third of seven races, but finished in fourth place, yet another frustrating competition for Fogh, who referred to fourth-place finishers as winners of the “leather medal” in comparison to gold, silver, and bronze.

“We were all pretty dejected,” Calder recalled. “It was a pretty damned somber sail back to the dock. Johnny (Kerr) and I were especially bummed for Hans.”

Later that day, the rules committee decided on its own to examine the actions of the second-place finisher, one of 78 protests filed over six classes in seven days of racing. The committee decided the Norwegian crew had violated the rules by deliberating rocking their boat. They were penalized back to fifth place, floating the Canadian crew into the bronze-medal position.

“I know how they must feel,” Fogh said at the time of the Norwegians. “They’re young people and it’s a lot harder when you’re young. Now I can turn around and tell them, ‘There’s lots of time, because even at my age you can win medals.’ ”

At age 46, Fogh had claimed a second Olympic medal 24 years after winning his first.

The Soling medals were presented by Constantine II, the deposed monarch of Greece. As Crown Prince Constantine in 1960, he had won an Olympic gold medal in the Dragon class. The former king recognized Fogh from those earlier games. In the solemn moment of placing a medal around Fogh’s neck, Constantine congratulated him by saying, “Not bad for an old fart.”

In 2009, he initiated the Hans Fogh Endowment Fund to support sailors, coaches and officials in Ontario.

Fogh died in Toronto of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease six days after his 76^th birthday. He leaves Kirsten, his wife of 49 years; two sons; five grandchildren; a brother; and, two sisters. He was predeceased by a sister.

Hans Fogh (right) and Ole Petersen at the 1960 Olympics off the coast of Italy.

Hans Fogh.

 

Gary Morris

Gary Morris (far left) reaches for the puck. The UBC skater was loaned to the Rossland (B.C.) Warriors for this 1964 exhibition game against his UBC Thunderbirds. The legendary Seth Martin is in goal for the Warriors.

 

Gary Wayne Morris

Born: October 7, 1941 (Trail, British Columbia)
Died: February 23, 2014 (Salmon Arm, British Columbia)

Gary Morris played hockey for the Thunderbirds varsity team at the University of British Columbia while studying engineering. Under coach David Bauer, a Basilian priest who was the brother of NHL star Bobby Bauer of Boston’s Kraut Line, the Thunderbirds recruited four star players from Eastern Canada.

Fr. Bauer’s plan was to build a team of student athletes as the core for a national hockey team to compete against the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia at the 1964 Olympics.

The four recruits — Barry McKenzie, Dave Chambers, Terry O’Malley, and goalie Ken Broderick — enrolled as students, giving the varsity team a solid core to play alongside such British Columbia products as Morris. 

In 1962-63, the Thunderbirds tied the Trail Smoke Eaters 1-1 in a preseason game. The Smoke Eaters had won the world championship earlier in the year. (Trail was also the legendary team from Morris’s hometown.) The exhibition tie was an indication the ’Birds would have a solid season.

UBC then beat the Alberta Golden Bears, by 5-2 and 3-2, to claim the Hamber Cup for the first time in 12 seasons.

The Thunderbirds advanced to the first University Cup tournament at Kingston, Ont., defeating the University of Sherbrooke, 6-2, before losing the cup to the McMaster Marlins, by 3-2.

In 1964, many of the UBC players represented at the Olympics, finishing fourth after a controversial ruling by officials. Morris did not play on the Olympic squad. Several of the players also had NHL careers.

The 1962-63 Thunderbirds team was inducted into the university’s sports hall of fame in 2012.

Morris graduated with a civil engineering degree in 1966. He worked on projects in 11 countries, becoming fluent in German, Spanish and French. He was working on Russian language studies at the time of his death. He leaves his wife, Susan Baumgartner; a son; and, a brother.

Eric Paterson

Eric Evan Paterson

Born: September 11, 1929 (Edmonton, Alberta)
Died: January 14, 2014 (Sherwood Park, Alberta)

Eric Paterson was half of the goaltending duo that helped Canada win an Olympic gold medal at the 1952 Winter Games.

He was added to the roster of the Edmonton Mercurys, an amateur team selected to represent Canada at the Olympics in Oslo, Norway.

The 22-year-old netminder had limited experience at any level in hockey. Diminutive and slight, at just 5-foot-9, weighing 155 pounds, he was known for his quick reflexes and for being a nervous wreck before games. He was paired with Ralph Hansch, 27, a more experienced goalie who worked as an Edmonton firefighter. (At the Olympics, Paterson wore sweater No. 1, while Hansch wore No. 0, a number since banned from use at the Games.) The pair surrendered 14 goals in eight games, as Canada won seven straight before tying the United States, 3-3, to claim the gold medal.

Paterson gave up just four goals in three games, all victories, for a 1.33 goals-against average. He recorded a shutout in an 11-0 whitewash of Poland, played outdoors in a driving snowstorm. He was also in goal for an 11-2 win over Switzerland and a 3-2 win over Sweden the following day. His performance was all the more remarkable for his having suffered a knee injury during a pre-Olympic exhibition tour of Europe.

The players returned home to Edmonton to a parade along Jasper Avenue. The Mercurys were sponsored by Jim Christiansen, a local automobile dealer who spent $100,000 to send the team to Europe and who covered player salaries for the duration. A half-century would pass before another Canadian team claimed Olympic hockey gold.

Paterson played two seasons of junior hockey with the Edmonton Maple Leafs before giving up the sport. He had been inactive for two seasons when he made his senior hockey debut on Jan. 5, 1951, when he was pressed into service as an emergency replacement for Bev Bentley of the Regina Caps, who was out with influenza. With Paterson in nets, the Caps upset the hometown Edmonton Flyers, by 4-2.

A year later, he was on Olympic ice.

Through the 1950s, he played for the Nelson (B.C.) Maple Leafs, Rossland (B.C.) Warriors and Ponoko (Alta.) Stampeders, who claimed the Western Canadian intermediate title in 1956. He gave up five goals in a loss in his one Western Hockey League game for the Edmonton Flyers.

One of his final games as a player was an exhibition pitting his intermediate Central Alberta All-Stars against the visiting Japanese Olympic team. The All-Stars defeated Japan 17-2 in a game played before 3,800 fans at Lacombe, Alta. Paterson made 27 saves, while a beleaguered pair of Japanese goalies stopped 53 of 70 shots fired their way.

Paterson worked as a machinist with the Edmonton Transit System for 42 years. He served on the executive of his union, Local No. 569 of the Amalgamated Transit Union. For 11 years, he was an appeals commissioner for the Workers Compensation Board. He was predeceased by Hansch, who died in 2008.

For five decades, the Mercurys held the unwanted title as most recent Canadian hockey Olympic gold medallists. They happily relinquished the title in 2002 when Canada defeated the United States to claim gold at the Olympics at Salt Lake City, Utah. Paterson was in attendance at the game.

The 1952 Olympic Mercurys with goalie Eric Paterson front row, centre.

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.”

Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson (left) shows a yellow card to the great Pelé in 1976.

Peter Thomas Johnson

Born: January 19, 1935 (London, England)
Died: February 22, 2013 (Burlington, Ontario)

Peter Johnson, a soccer referee, suffered a hairline fracture and needed 12 stitches to close a gash to his forehead when struck by a chair thrown by an irate fan. About 200 fans stormed the pitch at the Autostade in Montréal after the Rochester (N.Y.) Lancers scored to go ahead 4-0 in a North American Soccer League (NASL) match against the Olympics. The 1971 game was called with 25 minutes left on the clock.

“When those fans came after me I ran for the officials’ dressing room,” Johnson told the Montreal Gazette the next day. “I’d just got to the door and thought I had made it. Then the lights went out. I was unconscious for some time.”

He said the incident would not keep him from the pitch.

“It’s unfortunate a few barbarians can spoil it for so many.”

The school teacher, who lived at the time in Windsor, Ont., returned to Montreal five years later as an official for the soccer matches held during the Olympic Games.

Johnson’s career as a soccer referee was also notable for his having once booked Pelé, showing the Brazilian legend a yellow card in a 1976 NASL match in Tampa, Fla.

Johnson became a soccer referee in his native England, where he worked the rough English League. He immigrated to Canada in 1969, becoming one of the top officials in his adopted land. He refereed 11 international matches in his career. Johnson, a carpenter and joiner by training and, later, a teacher, became a referee instructor and took positions on the executive of soccer bodies. He opened an antique shop late in life and also served as president of the local lawn bowling club in Burlington, Ont.

Maurice Camyré

Maurice Camyré

Born: March 10, 1915 (St. Vital, Manitoba)
Died: January 15, 2013 (Winnipeg)

Member: Canadian Boxing Hall of Fame (1977)

 

A left-handed fighter and a teamster by trade, Maurice Camyré won the Dominion amateur welterweight championship in 1935.

The Manitoba boxer still held the crown when he won a spot on the small Canadian team at the 1936 Olympics at Berlin. He was eliminated from the tournament after losing his only bout by a decision.

The boxer was born in St. Vital, Man., now part of Winnipeg, to Agnes Rose (née Genthon) and Maurice Joseph Camyré. He learned to fight at the local Eagle Club inside a converted store before moving in 1932 to the Eclipse Club, which raised a modest sum in the midst of the Depression to supplement his meagre Olympic allowance.

Camyré, whose name was often rendered in newspaper accounts as Camyree, made his first national championship challenge in 1933, when he was outpointed by Paul Frederickson, also from Winnipeg, at the Amphitheatre. “There was little to choose between the two mitt-men,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported.

Frederickson, who had been an alternate for Canada at the 1932 Games, offered his crosstown rival another shot.

“He said he would give me a rematch,” Camyré told the Free Press in 1977. “He did, but he beat me even worse.” 

The 1935 Canadian amateur championships were held in Edmonton over two days in late May. Camyré won his preliminary bout over Donald Carmichael of Stony Plain, Alta. His hometown newspaper reported Camyré was “in better condition and making the most of it,” adding “both were willing but towards the finish the St. Vital boxer had a wide edge.”

Camyré next defeated Orville (Fishy) Heron, of Regina, a former Roughriders backfielder and provincial champion. The two victories on the opening day earned him a showdown against Nick Nickelo of Montreal, a 3-to-1 favourite. Nickelo “was outpunched and outgeneraled, and although he was the defending champion, the Winnipeg boy was obviously the superior,” the Free Press reported. Camyré then claimed the title over Gordon Schmalz by a decision. (Schmalz, of Kitchener, Ont., would win the crown the following year and hold it until 1938.)

The fighter was one of four Canadian boxers to do battle against American and British fighters at the first International Golden Gloves contest, held at Yankee Stadium in New York on July 3, 1935. He was joined by Bill Marquart, Winnipeg featherweight; Bob Carrington, a Calgary lightweight and a printer’s devil; and, Walter Franklin, of London, Ont. The quartet held a final workout at Stillman’s Gymnasium three days before the fight. 

About 48,000 fans crowded into the ball park, paying between 40 cents and $4.40, to see the amateur showdowns, some of which were refereed by former world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney.

Camyré won a decision over Pete Caraccilo, a Brooklyn fruit dealer, “in a close-range slugging match that had the rapidly filling stands agog,” the Canadian Press reported. “Things rocked along on pretty even terms until the third (round) when the Canadian uncorked a beautiful left to the head that sent Caraccilo spinning half way across the ring.”

In 1936, the welterweight (up to 147 pounds) champ then beat Schmalz once again to earn a spot on the four-fighter Olympic delegation.

Camyré’s Olympics lasted just the regulation three rounds of a single bout, as he was outpointed by Chester Rutecki of Chicago. (Rutecki would be eliminated by Finland’s Sten Suvio, the welterweight gold medal winner.)

The fighter returned home, to turn professional. He “decisively defeated” Vic Zyicki in a 1937 fight in Detroit, but retired as a fighter that same year after suffering an elbow injury. He worked occasional fights in Winnipeg as a referee. 

In 1941, he became an aircraft technician for Trans-Canada Airlines (later Air Canada), his employer until retirement.

He leaves three daughters, seven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and a sister. He was predeceased by three brothers, as well as his wife of 67 years, the former Mary Stewart, known as Polly, who died in 2007. The couple had met at the Eclipse Club.

Denis Brodeur

Joseph Germain Stanislas Denis Brodeur

Born: October 12, 1930 (Montréal)
Died: September 26, 2013 (Laval, Que.)

Denis Brodeur won an Olympic medal in hockey and worked for years as the official photographer for hockey’s Montreal Canadiens and baseball’s Montreal Expos, yet was better known in the final years of his life as the father of the winningest goalie in NHL history, Martin Brodeur.

The diminutive Denis Brodeur was a familiar figure at the Forum and the Bell Centre, as well as at Jarry Park and the Olympic Stadium. It was rare to see him without at least one camera dangling from straps around his neck. He took formal portraits and action shots, and was on hand in Moscow to capture the most famous goal in hockey history.

Brodeur was born in Montreal to Simone (née Reinhart) and René Brodeur. His first sporting love was baseball, which he began playing seriously at age 9. By his mid-20s, he was praised in the Val d’Or Star newspaper as “the best shortstop ever seen around our town.” He did not take up hockey as more than a recreation until age 15, when he filled in for a friend as goaltender. He played a season of junior B in the Laurentians at age 17 before joining the Victoriaville Tigers, whose star forward was a baby-faced Jean Beliveau.

Brodeur led his junior hockey circuit in wins (23) and goals-against average (2.34) with the Montreal Nationale in 1949-50. (A teammate was Bernie Geoffrion before he became known as Boom Boom.) Brodeur stood just 5-foot-5, weighing 165 pounds, a pipsqueak even by the standards of the day. But he was quick and a tireless workhorse, making him much in demand for teams needing extra goaltending help in the playoffs. He guarded the net for several senior teams in the following four seasons, donning the sweaters of the Saint John (N.B.) Beavers, Charlottetown Islanders, Moncton Hawks, Jonquiere Aces, Riviere-du-Loup Wolves and the Chicoutimi Sagueneens.

In 1954, the senior-A Dutchmen, representing Kitchener and Waterloo, Ont., bought the rights to the tiny netminder. Brodeur’s first game came against the Chatham Maroons, a 4-1 victory for the Dutchmen and an “impressive debut in the Dutchmen nets” for the new acquisition.

In the send-of-season playoffs, the Dutchmen defeated the Windsor Bulldogs to claim the Ontario Hockey Association crown. The Dutchmen then eliminated the Sault Ste. Marie (Ont.) Greyhounds and the Moncton (N.B.) Hawks before knocking off the Fort William (Ont.) Beavers to claim the Allan Cup as Canada’s top senior team. The champions were then pegged to represent Canada at the Olympic tournament to be held early in 1956.

In September, 1955, Brodeur joined the Cleveland Barons at training camp, where he was presented a cheque for $3,000 to turn pro. He went home contemplating the prospect of a big payday, though doing so would mean surrendering his amateur status and a spot on Canada’s Olympic roster. “I could not give up on the Olympics,” he told USA Today in 2006. “I sent the cheque back.”

The Olympic hockey tournament was held at an outdoor rink in the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. The Canadians were favoured to repeat the triumph four years earlier by the Edmonton Mercurys. The Dutchmen had two goalies with Brodeur sharing duties with Keith Woodall, of Elmira, Ont. The Quebecker got the nod for the first game, a 4-0 defeat of Germany. Woodall had little to do in a 23-0 shellacking of Austria. After Canada slipped past host Italy 3-1 with Brodeur in goal, the tournament favourites suffered a scare as Czechoslovakia twice led before falling 6-3. “The Canadian goalie was especially good,” the Czech coach said of Brodeur after the game.

The next opponent was the United States, represented by an unheralded squad of college students. The underdogs opened the scoring at 3:10 of the opening period when Johnny Mayasich, a 20-year-old college student from Minnesota, lofted a high shot from far out that Brodeur lost in the lights. The puck glanced off him and into the goal. Mayasich added two more goals as the Americans stunned all with a 4-1 upset victory.

After the game, several of the Canadian players were described as weeping unashamedly in the dressing room. Canadian coach Bobby Bauer called the opening goal a fluke. Explained the goalie: The puck “just seemed to roll up my shoulder.”

Fluke or not, Brodeur was not used again in the tournament, as Woodall shouldered the rest of the workload, another easy victory over Germany (10-0), a hard-fought win over Sweden (6-2), and a heartbreaking loss to the Soviet Union, by 2-0, as the Soviets claimed their first of many hockey golds. The Americans took silver, the Canadians bronze, widely viewed at home as a calamity.

Brodeur went 3-1 in the tournament with a shutout and a 2.00 goals-against average.

The goalie returned home to complete the junior-A season, before joining for the North Bay Trappers for two campaigns. He then began a professional career with the Buffalo Bisons of the American Hockey League and the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League. He returned to Montreal, where he played senior hockey for a few more seasons, having become an early adopter of the goalie mask. He estimated having taken more than 100 stitches to his face before following Jacques Plante in using face protection.

Long interested in photography, he found work on magazines owned by Pierre Péladeau, who sometimes called him to duty late at night. “J’ai bessoin de photos, cliss,” the boss would say, using a mild oath. Brodeur began shooting for the tabloid Montreal-Matín in 1962. He was a freelancer, hoping for a few dollars for action shots snapped with primitive equipment, all he could afford. In time, he purchased better cameras and more lenses, even placing strobe lights at the Forum to capture the glories of fast-paced hockey action.

The nightly hustle for piece-work sales eventually led to steadier employ as an official photographer with the Canadiens, as well as the Montreal Expos. He was promised the baseball job before the expansion team had signed a single player, only to be told later that a mistake had been made and the club had hired another photographer. Brodeur scoped out the fellow at spring training, decided he was too inexperienced for the work, and was on the spot to take the job when management fired the rival.

Brodeur traveled behind the forbidden Iron Curtain with Team Canada for the Summit Series in 1972. With the clock winding down in the eighth and final game, Brodeur fired off a series of 17 shots of Paul Henderson banging away in front of the Soviet goal. He captured an image of diminutive Yvan Cournoyer embracing an ecstatic Henderson, the great Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak helpless on his back like an upturned turtle. (Standing beside Brodeur at the Luzhniki Ice Palace in Moscow was Frank Lennon of the Toronto Star, whose almost identical image of the celebration is the one that appeared over four columns of the Star’s front page the next day. It has been reproduced on stamps and coins.) Brodeur sold at auction the Nikon with which he took the images.

The Henderson goal was his proudest moment as a photographer, he told Dave Stubbs of the Gazette, trumping even shots of his son hoisting the Stanley Cup, or winning the Olympic gold medal the elder Brodeur and his teammates found so elusive. Martin fils had the words “ Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956” and “Salt Lake City 2002” painted on his goalie mask.

The son also appears in a Brodeur photo on the cover of the 1996 book, “Goalies: Guardians of the Net.” Written by Daniel Daignault, the book features more than 500 Brodeur photographs.

Brodeur was diagnosed with brain tumours and died after undergoing several surgeries. In the midst of his treatment, he was distraught to learn of the death from brain cancer of Gary Carter, his favourite player among the Expos and one who befriended Martin and the other Brodeur sons.

Brodeur leaves Mireille Bérubé, whom he married in Riviere-du-Loup in 1956; four sons; and, two daughters. A son, Claude Brodeur, pitched two seasons of minor-league ball in the Montreal Expos system.

It was estimated he had shot more than one million images in his long career. In 2006, the NHL purchased his archive of 100,000 photos for $350,000 US. These were packed up in boxes before being placed in a refrigerated truck to be shipped to New York. The lensman found it difficult to surrender his life’s work. “It was worst when I looked at each box hermetically sealed with tape,” he told Bertrand Raymond of the Journal de Montreal. “I knew I would never again see my photos.”

 Denis Brodeur spotted NHL’s Clarence Campbell talking to Maurice (Rocket) Richard at the Forum. Mme. Richard is not amused.

Vaughan Baird

Vaughan Lawson Baird

Born: September 6, 1927 (Winnipeg)
Died: August 17, 2013 (Ste-Agathe, Man.)

Member:
Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame (1984)
Order of Canada (1992)

Few sports have had an advocate as passionate, dedicated and pugnacious as diving had in Vaughan Baird.

The Winnipeg lawyer, who had been a competitive diver at university, led a campaign to hive divers away from the auspices of swimming, under which they were distinctly second-class citizens.

In looking back at the schism, Baird cited an instance from 1934 when the swimming body struck Winnipeg diver Judy Moss from Canada’s British Empire Games team in favour of yet another swimmer. Her supporters in Winnipeg managed to raise the $300 in the midst of the Depression to send her to London, England. “She won the gold medal on the three-metre board,” Baird told the Winnipeg Free Press three years ago, “and swimming ended up with egg on its face.” The insult rankled even more than seven decades later.

Baird founded the Canadian Amateur Diving Association (now Diving Canada) in 1968. He also founded the Aquatic Hall of Fame and Museum, which was located at the Pan Am Pool in Winnipeg until a dispute over security of the items led to a bitter and protracted legal battle between Baird and the city.

Vaughan Lawson Baird was born in Winnipeg in 1927 to Elsie Katherine (née Lawson) and Samuel Garnet Baird, both of whom were born in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. Vaughan was the fifth of six children and the youngest of four sons. The brother closest to him in age, Jack Douglas Baird, was a navigator and bombardier with the Royal Canadian Air Force who died overseas on Dec. 6, 1944. Jack Baird, a flying officer, was 20. One brother served in the RCAF as a squadron leader, while the other served in the naval reserve.

Baird attended the University of Manitoba, where he won the school’s diving title as well as becoming provincial champion. He graduated in 1949, then moved to his parents’ home province to attend Dalhousie University, where he boxed before graduating with a law degree in 1952. He was admitted to the Nova Scotia bar later that year. Post-graduate studies at the Sorbonne in Paris left him with a lifelong appreciation for art and history, as well as a proficiency in the French language. After returning to Manitoba to practice law, he took part in occasional diving exhibitions including performances at what is now known as the Red River Ex.

He was named a diving judge for the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica in 1966, the beginning of several years service as a judge and administrator of his favourite sport. He judged at the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Pan American Games, and world aquatic championships until 1990. As chef de mission for Canada’s national diving team, he travelled behind the Iron Curtain, where he was shocked as a Christian by the sight of a church converted into an aquatic centre, the divers leaping from platforms built over the alter into a watery nave.

Baird served as a member of the Canadian Olympic Association, the Commonwealth Games Association of Canada, the Amateur Swimming Association of the Americas, and the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), the international governing body for aquatic sports.

The outspoken lawyer worked on committees organizing the Pan Am Games in Winnipeg in Canada’s centennial year of 1967. His forceful campaign embarrassed the federal government into contributing enough money to build an enclosed pool for the games. Without a roof, Baird argued, the facility would offer only 45 days per year of outdoor swimming and, with the prairie city’s notorious winds, only 15 days of world-class diving.

“It will be the finest pool of its type in Winnipeg and among the best in the world,” Baird said. He promised the $2.6-million facility would make the Manitoba capital a mecca for aquatic sports. Never limiting his sporting ambitions, he thought the pool would also be a landmark for a future bid for the city to become the first Canadian centre to host the Olympic Games.

He also helped found the Manitoba Sports Federation, as well as its sustaining lottery, which is now the Western Canada Lottery Corporation.

Away from the pool, the lawyer. appointed to Queen’s Counsel in 1966, handled several high-profile cases, most notably championing Franco-Manitoban language rights in a case involving the son of a friend who received a speeding ticket in English only. Baird argued all provincial laws had to be published in English and French under Section 23 of the Manitoba Act of 1870, a requirement ignored for decades. The case of Bilodeau v. Attorney-General of Manitoba began in 1980, the same year in which Quebec held its first independence referendum, contributing to a national sense of constitutional crisis.

Baird argued the case before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984, returning for an additional special hearing in 1991. In the end, Manitoba’s laws wound up being translated into Canada’s other official language.

In a separate case, he served as a defence lawyer in the first French-only trial to have been held in Manitoba in nearly a century.

The bilingual francophile was a troublesome figure for premier Sterling Lyon, a fellow progressive Conservative who once defeated Baird in a nominating contest for the provincial seat of Fort Garry.

Baird served as an executive for the provincial Conservatives. In 1967, he backed the federal leadership bid of fellow lawyer E. Davie Fulton, of Kamloops, B.C., who wound up finishing third behind Manitoba’s own Duff Roblin and the winner, Robert Stanfield of Nova Scotia.

Baird ran for a seat in the House of Commons in 1968, finishing third in the constituency of St. Boniface behind a New Democrat and a successful Liberal in the Trudeaumania sweep.

An art collector, Baird wrote short studies of the noted Manitoba sculptors Cecil Clarence Richards and Marguerite Taylor, as well as “A Canadian History of the Art and Sport of Diving.” All three titles were privately printed.

Three years ago, the Pan Am Diving Club at the Winnipeg pool renamed its annual winter invitational meet the Vaughan Baird Polar Bear Classic.

Baird sued the city for $2 million for the eviction of his beloved museum he founded from the pool his lobbying had built. He made provisions for the case to proceed even after his death.

He was predeceased by a sister and three brothers, and leaves a sister, Elsie Hughes. He never married. He died on Aug. 17 at his home, named Bel-Ami, in Ste-Agathe, a rural francophone community south of Winnipeg along the Red River, in which he swam all his life.

In 1961, two Canadian Army deserters tried to steal Baird’s car from his home, only to run it into a ditch. They then held Baird hostage for several hours, drinking his liquor and threatening him with death, until the slick-talking lawyer convinced them to surrender after five hours. The men were sentenced to seven years in jail. The news made the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press and Baird wrote his own dramatic account for Maclean’s magazine.

Mary Haydon

Mary (née Haydon) Provost

Born: July 29, 1920 (Ottawa)
Died: September 25, 2013 (Ottawa)

Member: Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame (2003)

 

Mary Haydon was Canada’s top female high jumper in the late 1930s and a favourite to claim a spot on the 1940 Canadian Olympic team. Her aspiration to compete against the world’s best ended when the Games were cancelled following the outbreak of war in Europe.

She first attempted the sport at a neighbourhood park with the encouragement of a park supervisor. She quickly learned the traditional scissors jump, enjoying immediate success.

“I had long legs,” she once said, “and I just jumped over.”

At Glebe Collegiate Institute in her native Ottawa, coach R.D. Campbell taught her the more modern Western roll technique in which the leg closest to the bar is used as a takeoff point.

Haydon was a 17-year-old student when she set a national junior high-jumping record of 5-feet, one-half-inch. She also claimed broad jump titles.

She was sometimes escorted to out-of-town track meets by her father, Capt. J.A.P. Haydon, a well-known local newspaperman and decorated veteran of the Great War who had won a Military Cross for having captured six prisoners while on a scouting patrol in France’s Jigsaw Wood in 1918.

In 1938, she won the senior Dominion high-jumping championship at a meet in Halifax. She retained her title the following year with an impressive clearance of 5-feet, 1-and-a-half inches at the national championship at Hamilton, Ont. Ottawa city council awarded her a civic crest in honour of her success.

A top Olympic prospect, Haydon’s dream was dashed when the 1940 Summer Games, originally awarded to Tokyo but transferred to Helsinki, were cancelled.

“I didn’t feel cheated,” she told the Ottawa Citizen in 2003. “The war was on, and I never thought of it. When the war was over, I was into basketball. I don’t linger on things that have gone.”

She married Sgt. Peter Provost of the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940. A son was born two years later.

In 1942, her father was convicted of seven counts of fraud regarding the awarding of war contracts. He was sentenced to eight months in jail and a fine of $700.

The Olympics returned in 1948 after a 12-year hiatus. She returned to high jumping, winning meets prior to the Olympic trials while falling short of the qualifying standard of five feet.

At the trials in Montreal, she finished tied in third place in a competition won by Doreen Dredge of Kelvington, Sask.

Away from track and field, she was also a notable club athlete at tennis and golf, while winning league titles in basketball. She also bowled five pin.

“Everything just came easy to me,” she told the Citizen. “Don’t ask me why. I haven’t a clue.”

The newspaper credited her with 24 provincial and national titles in high jumping and long jumping. Her junior record lasted a decade.

She was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.

Afflicted with advanced Alzheimer’s, the former athlete was placed in a long-term care facility three years ago. She earned $43,000 in pensions, which was not enough to cover the cost of her care, creating a burden for her children, both of whom are retired. The family’s plight was recorded in the same daily newspaper which once so enthusiastically recorded her athletic triumphs. She died peacefully, aged 93.