Soccer gave Don Lovegrove his greatest kick
Covered, and nurtured, sports for The Spectator for 30 years
At last month’s Hamilton Soccer Hall of Fame Dinner, the biographical information playing on the constant video loop cited a lot of newspaper stories about the newest inductees.
Don Lovegrove had written almost all of them.
Lovegrove, who died in Burlington late last week at the age of 87, was soccer coverage in this town, but he was much more than that. He was one of those giants upon whose shoulders the current generation of local sports media still stand.
“Lovey” — the only name by which we in the sports department ever referred to him — was with The Spectator for 37 years, the last 30 of them strictly in sports.
“It was so important to him that he worked at The Hamilton Spectator,” said his daughter, Linda. “He was so, so proud of that. The identifying sticker on his walker was a piece from The Spectator.
“Even last year, every time we’d go downtown in Burlington, somebody would come up to him and ask, ‘Are you Don Lovegrove?’ That was so unbelievable for an 86-year-old man to be remembered like that.”
He is certainly remembered at McMaster, where he was granted an honorary athletic letter and named as a Mac “Friend of Distinction.” In 1987, he was awarded the 1987 national media award by the CIAU, one of the predecessors to U Sport. He covered the
first “College Bowl” which is now called the Vanier Cup, and missed only a small handful of national university football championships during his career.
“He was one of the ‘Deans’ of Canadian university sport,” says McMaster’s Media and Advertising co-ordinator for athletics, Bill Malley, who started at Mac in 1988.
“He was kind and supportive to me as a young man, and very passionate about the beat. But he was never shy about telling me if we weren’t doing something well, and we needed that at the time. It was always constructive criticism.”
Lovegrove covered everything, professional and amateur, including the 1986 World Cup, the only one to ever that had a Canadian men’s team in it, so he would have relished Wednesday’s announcement that Canada will co-host the 2026 tournament.
But amateur sport was his real love.
In his retirement farewell address to Spectator readers in late 1990, Lovey said that he didn’t like the way the pro sports world was heading.
“But one can find solace and hope on the playing fields of our schools and universities,” he also wrote. “Where sport is still practised for the sake of sport, where the motto of ‘sound mind, sound body’ is more than just a catchy phrase.”
Garry McKay, who worked in the sports department with Lovegrove for the better part of a quarter-century recalls him as “just a great guy, and so easy to work with. If you had an idea for a story that was on one of his many beats, he didn’t say ‘I’m taking that,’ he’d ask if you wanted to do it, or have him do it. He was a mentor to all the young guys.”
Lovegrove lost his wife Barbara two years ago. They are survived by their children Linda, Wayne and Randy, four grandchildren and one grandchild. Visitation is at Smith’s Funeral Home on Brant Street in Burlington from 7 to 9 p.m. on Sunday June 17. Service will be at the funeral home chapel Monday at 10:30 a.m.