They were first and most certainly foremost
To celebrate our country’s birthday, the Star is showcasing 150 of the quintessential Canadian sporting characters and moments of the last 150 years. In Part 5 of our 10-part series, we highlight Canada’s sporting pioneers. Sarah Burke There’s a long list of women’s firsts attached to Sarah Burke’s name for the years she spent pushing boundaries and increasing the difficulty of her tricks in freestyle ski competitions. But, more importantly, she was the first person who believed that women had a place at the top of freestyle skiing’s new disciplines and that half-pipe and slopestyle belonged in the Olympics.
Burke, raised in Midland Ont., began as a moguls skier but was attracted to all the jumps and tricks that could be done in the half-pipe. When she started competing there were few other women so she competed against the men and this wasn’t the dark ages, just the late 1990s.
She fought for equality for women within the male-dominated action-sports world of X Games and pushed the International Olympic Committee to include new freestyle ski events for both men and women.
Burke’s dream came true in 2014 when half-pipe and slopestyle skiing events were included in the Sochi Olympics, but tragically she wasn’t there to compete for gold. Burke died in 2012 at the age of 29 after succumbing to injuries from a fall in training.
But many athletes in Sochi knew they wouldn’t be there without her and, despite the IOC rule forbidding Sarah stickers on their helmets, they found numerous ways to remember. The night of the half-pipe final, the snow groomers came down the pipe in the shape of a heart for Burke, the fearless competitor who shaped her sport and will forever be remembered for it. James Naismith Charged with coming up with something to keep athletes “distracted” during the hard New England months, an educator/ physician/chaplain from tiny Almonte, Ont., came up with an idea that would eventually turn into one of the most popular games on the planet.
Dr. James Naismith came up with a rudimentary form of basketball in 1891 and the rest, as they say, is history.
The first games bore little resemblance to today. There were peach baskets nailed to the walls of the YMCA gym in Springfield, Mass., there were nine players on each team, dribbling was not allowed and the games were stopped for jump balls after every basket.
But Naismith had found an indoor winter exercise to keep athletes in shape while shaping the future of sports. Arnie Boldt He lost his leg in a farm accident when he was three but in the 1960s that just made Arnie Boldt another kid growing up in rural Saskatchewan where physical injuries were something to overcome without fanfare.
In university, he high-jumped with able-bodied athletes and, in 1976, when he was introduced to para sport, he won gold medals at the Toronto Paralympiad in high jump and long jump and set the first of his many world records.
His athletic career continued for almost 20 years and he continually awed spectators with his ability to clear bars with a run-up that was just a few one-legged hops that most jumpers couldn’t manage with two legs. William George Beers At the time of Confederation, William George Beers was a dentist making his living in Montreal. His true passions, though, were playing lacrosse and growing the game he believed was truly a Canadian one.
In 1867, he formed the National Lacrosse Association and capitalized on the nationalistic fervour that accompanied Canada’s Confederation to promote the sport adapted from a popular First Nations game, with the slogan “our country, our game.”
Beers was the first person to codify the rules of the game, an integral component to growing the sport and by the end of the 1867, the nation’s 10 lacrosse clubs had grown to 80, with over 2,000 members, in large part because of Beers’ passion for the game. Toller Cranston Where other men turned up in their team uniforms, Toller Cranston arrived at competitions in a full-length fur coat. He challenged tradition, always, and in the process revolutionized men’s figure skating.
As with most people who are ahead of their time, personal success didn’t come easily for him as judges simply didn’t know how to score his innovative skating full of arm movement and musical expression within their existing standards.
On paper, his greatest achievement was the bronze medal he won at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics (by which point many of the best in the world had already adopted his style), but his far bigger legacy is his artistic vision and style that brought figure skating fans to their feet and transformed the sport forever. The Edmonton Grads The Commercial Graduates Basketball Club — coached by J. Percy Page, an early believer in the sporting abilities of women and proponent of teamwork over individual stars — ruled women’s basketball from 1915 to 1940.
They’re generally considered to have played 522 games, winning all but 20 of them, producing a winning record that remains unparalleled by any team, male or female, in any sport in Canada. Not only did they show that women could play and excel at it, the team’s incredible feats — broadcast on the radio in those days before television — gave Edmonton something to cheer during difficult interwar years.
The team represented Canada at four Olympics and won every single game but came away with no medals because women’s basketball wasn’t included as an official sport until 1976 — 40 years after the men. Dr. Robert Jackson He spent 1964 on a fellowship in Japan and brought home ideas that would transform sports medicine and grow sport for athletes with disabilities.
He brought the arthroscopic surgery he learned from a Japanese doctor to North America. He taught others the surgical techniques, which allowed for less invasive surgery on knees and other joints, greatly reducing the healing time.
But it was his great disappointment to discover that Canada had sent a team to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (where he worked as an orthopedic consultant) but not the Paralympics. That led him to become the founder of the Canadian Paralympic movement.
He came home, found like-minded people and formed the Canadian Wheelchair Sport Association in 1967 and went on to organize the 1976 Paralympiad held in Toronto to parallel the Olympic Games in Montreal. Abby Hoffman Abby Hoffman wanted to play competitive hockey so the nineyear-old cut her hair off, shorted her name to Ab, and joined the boys’ team.
She played well, too well it turned out, because she was chosen for an all-star game where players had to produce birth certif- icates. This being 1956, the outrage was predictable when it was discovered that Ab, who played such strong defence wearing No. 6, was really Abigail. “I defy anyone to pick her out as a girl when the team is on the ice,” her then-coach said.
She swam competitively for a time before moving on to track to become an 800-metre specialist representing Canada at the 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976 Olympics.
Her time in hockey was not her last encounter with inequity and she fought back when she was barred from the University of Toronto’s Hart House, the only indoor track in the Ontario in 1966. That all-male facility was opened to women because of her efforts and there’s a plaque bearing her quote: “Only she who attempts the absurd will achieve the impossible.” Ferguson Jenkins The Chicago Cubs didn’t do an awful lot of winning in the 1960s but pitcher Ferguson Jenkins did in a carving out a Hall of Fame career that sets him apart from just about every Canadian major-leaguer before or since.
The native of Chatham, Ont., won 20 or more games for the Cubs in six consecutive seasons from 1967 to 1972, leading the National League in wins in 1971 with 24. That season the righthander also posted an astonishing 30 complete games en route to becoming the first Cubs pitcher — and the first Canadian — to win the Cy Young Award.
And because baseball wasn’t nearly as financially lucrative then as it is now, Jenkins found work in the off-season from 1967 to ’69 touring with the Harlem Globetrotters.
Jenkins’s crowning achievement came in 1991 when he became the first Canadian enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Moe Norman Pipeline Moe they called him, an extraordinary striker of a golf ball and an extraordinarily quirky product of Kitchener who some think had the most effective swing in the history of the game.
Notoriously shy, Norman would stand at the end of the driving range at tournaments, hitting shot after shot after shot that flew as true as an arrow and the pros of the day would flock to watch him. “When you talk about Moe Norman, you are talking about a legend,” Lee Trevino once said.
How true was his swing? He could hit 20 balls and all 20 would end up in a little circle the size of a manhole cover, it was said.
How quirky was he? Legend has it a caddy once told him he could play a hole with a driver and 9-iron. He hit the 9-iron off the tee and reached the green with the driver. Dr. Tom Pashby It’s unimaginable in this day and age that any hockey player at any level would even venture on the ice for a game without wearing a helmet; it’s inconceivable that any league would allow it.
But were it not for the efforts of the Toronto-born Pashby, that sensible equipment requirement might not have happened as soon as it did.
As the chairman of the Canadian Standards Association for two decades beginning in 1975, Pashby pushed not only for mandatory helmets and face guards but for increased penalties to deal with increased roughness in the sport.
Pashby’s fight to make the sport safer from a very personal point of view. In the 1950s his son, Bill, suffered a concussion during a game. According to the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, “Pashby bought a polycarbonate helment from Sweden and forbade his son from playing unless he wore it.” Foxy Irwin Out of necessity, a baseball glove for fielders was invented. Foxy Irwin, whose 1858 birth in Toronto predates the country, found himself in a quandary while playing for the minor-league Providence Grays in 1883. The shortstop had broken two fingers on his left (catching) hand and wanted to keep playing.
An oversized buckskin glove was padded, two fingers were sewn together so the bandages would fit and the infielder’s glove was born; until that point, only first basemen and catchers were allowed to use gloves but, by the next season, virtually every player was wearing a glove fashioned after the one Irwin had concocted.
How well it worked is up for debate, though. Over the course of his next two seasons, Irwin committed 98 errors in 163 games. Jacques Plante There’s nothing like a goaltender taking a puck in the face to revolutionize equipment in the sport.
After getting smacked in the face by an Andy Bathgate shot on Nov. 1, 1959, Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens left a pool of blood on the ice as he headed to the dressing room for stitches, later returning to the bench wearing a homemade mask he’d been wearing in practice.
Coach Toe Blake was completely against the idea but relented, allowing Plante to head back into the crease if he agreed to lose the contraption after his cut had healed.
After a win that night, Blake became less annoyed by the newfangled look and as Montreal’s unbeaten streak ran to 18 games with the masked Plante winning them all, the coach’s issue disappeared. Rick Hansen As a man in a wheelchair, Rick Hansen encountered times that people in restaurants or airports pointedly spoke to someone he was with, rather than to him, as though being unable to walk meant he was unable to speak.
His Man in Motion world tour, which started in 1985 and would see him shake the Pope’s hand in Rome, wheel through the Swiss Alps, along the Great Wall of China and into the Australian desert before ending in 1987, helped change perceptions about physical disability.
Hansen, already a six-time Paralympic medallist, achieved his goal of raising awareness about the challenges of a chair and the need for more funds for spinal-cord research and rehabilitation but he did more than that. By the time he was finished, it was his abilities, not his disability, that people were thinking about. Lucile Wheeler Canada’s story of global success on the ski hills begins with Lucile Wheeler, the Quebec sensation who blazed the trail for women in the country starting in the 1950s.
The native of tiny Sainte-Jovite began her ascent to the top of the global skiing list in 1956 at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, winning a downhill bronze, the first North American woman or man to capture a Games medal in that discipline.
Two years later she became the first North American — male or female — to win a world championship in downhill, accomplishing the feat in Bad Gastein, Austria, and then added the giant slalom title for good measure.
Wheeler was the 1958 winner of the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s top athlete, was inducted into the Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and made a member of the Order of Canada.