Pinball tops next class into Canada’s sports hall
Mike (Pinball) Clemons came to Canada in 1989 expecting to stay a couple of years and get football out of his system. Some 27 years later, he’s a Canadian citizen and will soon be a member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
Clemons, 51, was among six athletes named for induction Tuesday. The others were Hockey Hall of Famer Bryan Trottier, world champion curler Colleen Jones, Paralympian Stephanie Dixon, cross-country skier/kayaker Sue Holloway and shorttrack speedskater Annie Perreault.
Dr. Frank Hayden, who created the Special Olympics, will enter as a builder. The formal induction ceremony is set for Nov. 1.
“I played one year in the NFL and had a job with Honeywell, and they were going to pay for me to get my MBA and so I had life figured out,” Clemons said. “But I couldn’t get this football thing out of me so I said, ‘I’m going to come up here and play a couple of years and get it out of my system.’
“So this is a couple of years later right?”
Clemons played 12 seasons in Toronto, winning three Grey Cups (1991, ’96 and ’97). The two-time CFL all-star was the league’s outstanding player in 1990 after accumulating a league-record 3,300 all-purpose yards.
Trottier, 59, won four Stanley Cups with a New York Islanders team that dominated the NHL in the early 1980s. He added two more with the Pittsburgh Penguins and was an assistant coach with the Cup-winning Colorado Avalanche in 2001.
The nine-time all-star was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1997, but called Tuesday’s induction “probably my highest honour as an individual and athlete.”
Jones, 56, led Canada to world women’s curling titles in 2001 and 2004 and skipped her Halifax rink to six Canadian women’s championships. She earned an unprecedented four straight national titles (2001-04) and a record 138 wins as a skip.
Dixon, of Brampton, was born without her right hip and leg but the three-time Paralympian captured 19 Paralympic medals (seven gold, 10 silver, two bronze) and seven Parapan American medals (six gold, one silver).
Perreault, 44, a three-time Olympian from Rock Forest, Que., won four world championships (1990, 1991, 1992 and 1997) with the Canadian women’s 3,000-metre relay team. She captured Olympic gold at the 1992 Albertville Games (3,000-metre relay) and ’98 Nagano Games (500 metres).
Holloway, 60, of Halifax, became the first woman to compete in two Olympics in the same year when she appeared in the1976 Summer Games (canoe) and Winter Games (crosscountry skiing). She was named Canada’s flag-bearer for the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, but was denied that chance when Canada boycotted the competition.