What makes our Sports Hall of Fame special?
‘Where you come from’:
It was during a training camp early in his career that his knee exploded. Ripped the ligament right off the bone. The kind of injury that hurts just to read about it. Actually doing it? Don’t ask.
But with no signed contract and a pregnant wife at home, missing a whole season and the paycheques that came with it wasn’t an option. So just a few weeks after his cast was removed, Peter Dalla Riva gritted his teeth and got himself back on the field for the Montreal Alouettes. Tough? The man’s synapses are clearly made of saddle leather and his psyche, of iron. Even so, there he was on Wednesday afternoon, softly dabbing at his eyes again and again as a video of his life played during his induction to the Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame.
“Any hall of fame is special,” he says. “This one here is where you come from.”
If there was a theme at the induction event, that was it. The unique place this city plays in all the stories of the honorees.
The 1965 Stoney Creek Little League team that remains the only Canadian squad ever to make it to the championship game of that world tournament talked about it.
Brad Ackles, who was on that team, explained how significant their success was to that suburb and how significant that suburb was to their success.
“I think it was one of the greatest community events that ever happened here,” he says.
Those who talked about former Spectator sports editor M.M. Robinson mentioned the importance of Hamilton and its place in his heart and how it was central to why he created the British Empire Games — eventually renamed the Commonwealth Games — and brought many of the world’s greatest athletes here back in 1930.
Former Tiger-Cat player and coach Don Sutherin, who played in eight Grey Cups (winning four) and coached in three more (winning one) talked about it. How the city adopted him when he came north to be a place-kicker and defensive back. Then stuck around to be a defensive co-ordinator and head coach.
“I have so much respect for this city,” he says.
And Murray Oliver’s son talked about how proud his late father was about the place he grew up before going to the NHL and becoming the second-highest-scoring player from Hamilton behind just Dave Andreychuk.
“You could really tell he had a lot of pride in his hometown,” Michael Oliver says.
The star of this show was the athletes. The supporting cast was their city.
A city that’s still pumping out worthy inductees nine years after the hall was founded. Frankly, it’s amazing that these five hadn’t made their way in before now.
It says something about how necessary a local hall was and how deep this town’s well of athletic achievement goes.
There are still plenty of other names that come to mind who haven’t yet been tapped, too. Many of those being women, who didn’t have as prominent role in
this city’s long-ago sporting past but have carved out huge legacies in the past couple decades and are now primed to be included.
While some folks who’ve now found a home in the Hamilton hall — or someday will be — have never been recognized elsewhere for their athletic achievements, others had already been inducted into a couple or even a few halls of fame before their own city’s highest sporting honour came calling.
Nine of the 57 people and six teams now memorialized here are also in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, three are in the Hockey Hall of Fame, several are in Canadian and international halls for their sports, seven are on the Ticats’ wall of honour and
three have their numbers retired. One has a street named after him, two have football fields named after them and three have schools in their name.
How much can the Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame really mean to folks like that?
You have no idea, says Dalla Riva, member of three other halls, a champion and a guy whose number has been retired by his team.
“All the guys here know the special feeling,” he explains. “It’s where you come from.”