Their cups runneth over for operation jockstrap
Equipment will be winging its way to unprotected Israeli youth
Glenda Lisbona is accustomed to fielding phone calls from her middle-aged son, David, a Montreal banker who, for just about forever, has been enlisting his now 78-yearold mother as a helper during times of need. And that help can take many forms, such as digging out her boy’s car after he got stuck in the snow on his way to a law school exam, some years back, and, lately, looking after the grandchildren.
“I help David out when I can,” Glenda says. “But when he phoned me this time I didn’t know what he was talking about. He told me he needed cups. Cups? So I asked him, ‘What kind of cups?’ David and his brother played hockey, and so what he was talking about was jockstraps.”
Lisbona’s instructions to his mother were precise: she was to hit up every Dollarama outlet she could find in her end of Montreal and clean them out of jockstraps — an essential piece of hockey equipment that typically retails for $15 to $20, but was on offer at the discount chain for a mere three bucks a cup.
Lisbona, the younger, had a higher purpose in mind. The 48-year-old has long been involved in a charity that ships hockey gear to Metula, an Israeli town on the Lebanon border that is home to the country’s only Olympic-sized skating rink — plus the Canada Israel Hockey School. The school brings together Jews, Druze and Arab kids in the hope that, through hockey, they build cross-cultural understanding in a region with long simmering tensions. It is also a program that, in November, had informed its Canadian benefactors that what the players needed most wasn’t more skates, or gloves, or pants — but cups (a.k.a. jockstraps).
“It was so obvious to me after they told us,” David Lisbona says. “We hadn’t been sending them cups, and they don’t have a culture of tackle football — and they don’t really use them for soccer — so they simply aren’t available in Israel.”
Lisbona and his mother purchased about 30 discounted jocks in the Montreal area, which was a good start, but far short of the 300-plus he required to outfit all the Israeli players. So Lisbona turned to Facebook, appealing to his friends across the country to go forth and buy cups. Progress reports rolled back to him: Winnipeg had no discounted jocks; Edmonton had 15; Squamish yielded 29 cups; while the Toronto area had jocks aplenty.
The entire haul, at last count, numbered 350. It is currently displayed on Lisbona’s basement floor.
“My wife just shakes her head and goes back upstairs,” he says.
Operation jockstrap is scheduled to depart Canada on Dec. 17, when the 350 cups are booked aboard a non-stop flight to Tel Aviv.
“Those kids are going to be well-protected,” Lisbona says, chuckling. “We now have a jock for every child.”