Darryl Sittler at Hometown Hockey,
KITCHENER — Jane Rumig, 60, reached up underneath her sunglasses and wiped away tears.
A St. Jacobs boy Rumig had grown up beside had just made her cry as she watched him speak on a big stage at Kitchener City Hall.
His name? Leafs legend Darryl Sittler, her first cousin.
“He’s very special to me,” said Rumig, wearing her signed No. 27 Sittler jersey.
“He’s as real as anybody. He doesn’t think he’s this big superstar. He’s down to earth.”
Real means humble and approachable. Real means vulnerable.
“I lost my wife Wendy to cancer,” Sittler, 68, told a hockey carnival crowd on a damp Saturday afternoon as Oktoberfest began. “It’s 17 years today that she passed away.”
So, on a sad anniversary, Sittler was asked for his greatest moment.
Scoring 10 points in a single game? Nope. Being Leafs captain during the bizarre and tumultuous ownership reign of Harold Ballard? No way. Serving as grand marshal for the 1995 Oktoberfest parade? Uh, no.
Winning the Canada Cup with an overtime goal? Being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame? Not quite.
It was standing on the ice with his three kids, watching his number and banner raised to the rafters in Toronto. Written on the bottom of the banner was Wendy’s name, which television cameras zoomed in on.
That was his Sittler’s most cherished moment — watching that banner rise slowly to the heavens with his wife of 30 years beside him in spirit.
“That was my most memorable moment,” Sittler told a few hundred Kitchener Civic Square spectators on Saturday. “The fact my kids were there and Wendy’s name is on the banner. That was special.”
And with that, Rumig felt a tickle and a trickle on her cheek.
“Wendy was a very special lady,” she said.
There is crying in hockey, after all.
Even in Rogers Hometown Hockey’s corporate carnival atmosphere, which took over Carl Zehr Square for the Thanksgiving weekend as Oktoberfest got into full swing.
Lederhosen and tie-down hockey jerseys, like pizza slices and sauerkraut, can make for a stomach-turning visual mix.
A live band rocked out as sneakered kids played a perpetual pickup game amid giant posters of NHL heroes.
Egos, in a game for millionaires, can be monstrously big.
Yet Sittler, who grew up with seven siblings, seems to exude small-town charm and Woolwich-raised humility. And Rumig is always ready to defend him.
“I’ll hear people say he’s a snob and I’m like, ‘Really? No,’” said Rumig, who used to travel to London to watch Sittler’s junior games. “First, his parents would not allow it. And nor would Wendy.”
Maybe all those early mornings Sittler spent working at the butcher shop run by his uncle — Rumig’s father — helped trim fat of entitlement from his character.
“Saturday mornings, I was up at five at the St. Jacobs market selling bacon and sausage and trying to count out change and get it right,” Sittler said.
Now, his original Leafs banner was moved to that same market.
“He’s a country bumpkin,” said Dianne Weldon of Kitchener, who grew up in the St. Jacobs cluster of houses that included Sittler’s and Rumig’s.
“He’s never changed.”
The 10-point game Sittler enjoyed against Boston in 1976, after eating a drive-thru chicken dinner on his car’s front seat? Weldon was there.
She got her dad tickets for that game as a Christmas present. Her dad thought the Bruins would clean the Leafs’ clocks. With every Sittler goal, Weldon punched her dad in the arm.
“When we came home, he was black and blue,” Weldon said.
In blue ink, on the right side of her white Leafs jersey, Sittler identifies Rumig as his No. 1 fan, just above his signature.
“He’s always been my hero,” she said.
Heroes sometimes make you cry. But Sittler also made everyone laugh after a blustery gust of wind knocked over a standing banner on stage.
“There’s the Harold Ballard effect,” quipped Sittler, now a community representative for the Leafs. “It always happens.”