Fitting that Drake, Cole honoured together

In 1980, while working for the Calgary Herald, I was sent on my first ever road assignment. I packed my typewriter (yeah, that’s what we wrote on) and headed all the way to Edmonton to cover the Canada West university hockey finals.

The University of Alberta was playing the University of Calgary for the championship. It was there I got to know Clare Drake, who had just returned from coaching Team Canada at the Lake Placid Olympics. And when you spend any time with Clare — he’s one of those people in sports known mostly by first name — it stuck with you.

What also stuck with me from that weekend was the impressive reporter I met while covering playoff series, Cam Cole of the Edmonton Journal.

That was 37 years ago and here we are on Hockey Hall of Fame weekend, and Clare Drake is being inducted in the Builder category. Unfortunately, at 89, he’s not well enough to attend.

Really, though, they should have been beside each other, the coach and his chronicler.

Cole, who wrote so much about Drake and so many other subjects, and for almost half a century has been on the short list of Canada’s elite sports columnists, will receive the Elmer Ferguson Award, the writer’s version of Hall of Fame acceptance.

Proud to have known, appreciated and worked alongside both of these deserved Hall of Famers.