Hall of Fame welcomes Class of 2018
The Victoria Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2018 came together on Saturday night at the Westin Bear Mountain after careers that took them to the Olympics from Barcelona to Beijing and the major leagues of baseball from the Bay Area to Chicago.
“This is a tremendous sports community and hundreds of people lifted me to the podium,” said rower Dave Calder, a world champion and four-time Olympian, who won a silver medal in the 2008 Olympic Games.
“This city lives and breathes highperformance sport. I was so inspired as a kid by rubbing shoulders at Elk Lake with that 1992 Barcelona Olympic group and rowers such as Silken Laumann, Derek Porter and Darren Barber.”
Also inducted was MLB pitcher Rich Harden, who came out of Layritz minor baseball to record a 59-38 Major League Baseball record over nine seasons, mostly with the Oakland Athletics and Chicago Cubs, with a 3.76 career ERA and stellar 949 strikeouts in 928 innings, which is the 14th best strikeout-rate-byinnings in MLB history.
“I wasn’t even thinking about the pros or college. I didn’t know much about it. I just wanted to have fun playing baseball,” Harden said.
Also enshrined were University of Victoria Vikes great and Canadian Olympic team field-hockey goaltender Deb Whitten, whose reflexes, agility and steely resolve backstopped Canada to two Pan Am Games medals and at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and 1990 and 1994 World Cups.
It all started as a kid when older brother Greg Whitten told Deb, now associate superintendent of School District 61, that she would have to go in goal if she wanted to play with the boys in road hockey.
“The culture and climate of sport in Victoria was so conducive to success,” Whitten said.
The other inductees included fourtime Canadian senior women’s golf champion Alison Murdoch, legendary late judo builder Yeiji Inouye, former MLB umpire Ian Lamplugh, swim coach Ron Jacks, whose lengthy career on the Saanich Commonwealth Place pool deck has produced national and Olympic medallists, and former SportHost Victoria executive director Hugh MacDonald.
“This class shows what a great sports community we have,” Lamplugh said.
The Victoria Sports Hall of Fame was established in 1991. Plaques honouring the Class of 2018 will join those of the 223 previous inductees which hang on the concourse walls of Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre.