AN OLD PHONE BOOK BRINGS UP MEMORIES OF DAYS, PEOPLE PAST
Names and numbers representing lives, like a personal travel guide through time
On the day that Henri Richard passed away, I went rummaging through drawers in my office, searching for an old phone book that might have had a number for former Canadiens coach Al Macneil.
The book was found. The number wasn’t.
Then I started thumbing through the battered phone book, stopping on names and people, so many gone. And I was thinking, we don’t really look at personal phone books the way we used to. Our phone lists are now kept inside our phones. If we want to call somebody, we ask for a number.
But this phone book, sitting on my desk, took me back and I found myself reading through the pages, pausing a lot, names and numbers representing stories of your life and their lives. Almost a personal travel guide through time.
The pages of the book opened to A and B opposite each other and the first printed names on the top of the right page: Ballard, printed twice. Harold and his son Bill. Harold, former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, has been gone since 1990. And you don’t wonder where that time has gone as much as you wonder about the personal relationships you’ve had along the way.
I knew Bill Ballard, the son, much better than I knew Harold. Bill used to eat regularly at Zoulpy’s, then a King Street institution of sorts. Often you would see Bill having breakfast or lunch there, sometimes with Dusty Cohl, the inventor of the Toronto Film Festival. Those meals were never quiet and always entertaining.
Dusty’s phone number is found under the C’s in my book. He passed away in 2008.
It’s amazing the names you trip over while thumbing through the pages of a reporter’s phone book, which used to be our professional lifeblood.
Don Baizley is listed under the B’s and so is Trevor Berbick. You couldn’t find two people more different. Baizley was the most honest and maybe most compelling player agent in NHL history. Baizley died in 2013.
Poor Berbick was crazy. Crazy yet talented. He was the Canadian heavyweight champion, living out of Halifax, who wasn’t really Canadian we found out later. He was the rather sad winner of Muhammad Ali’s last professional fight in 1981 and also the opponent in the rather short bout that made Mike Tyson the youngest heavyweight champion in history.
Berbick was my rainy day call. If it was a weekday and there was nothing to write about, I’d call Trevor. Within a minute or two, I had a story.
His life ended with a story. In 2006, Berbick was murdered in Jamaica by his nephew, who was sentenced to life in prison.
The pages turn and there is Johnny Bower’s name, and you smile. And on the same page were two significant figures in my life, Ed Chynoweth and Leo Cahill.
Chynoweth used to run junior hockey in Canada. I was a kid covering the NHL in the early ’80s when we first met. For some reason we became friends, even though he was 16 years older. We played on the same softball teams. We wound up in the same fantasy leagues. Chynoweth was hugely regarded and respected in hockey. For a young man starting out, his guidance and friendship helped me pave out a career. Chynoweth died in 2008.
Cahill was a CFL coach, a WFL general manager, a carnival barker, a football savant and as the years went on, he became more and more important to me as he got older and less well. In his final years, he had run out of money. There was no pension plan for CFL coaches. He needed help and with the assistance of his grandson, we put together a Gofundme page for Leo.
In a matter of a weekend, more than $30,000 was raised for him, and most of that came from sports figures who may not have known his name or his time. I miss Leo, who died in 2018.
D in the phone book made me stop at Angelo Dundee and Lou Duva, two giants of boxing.
Dundee was best known as Ali’s trainer. He also trained Sugar Ray Leonard. Dundee loved the fact I was from Toronto, not because he cared much for me. But every time I saw him, he asked the same question: “How’s Milt?” referring to Toronto Star columnist Milt Dunnell. Dunnell had been part of the Ali press entourage when there was one and was close with Dundee.
Duva was a Fred Flintstone-type character of a trainer and manager. He was in Evander Holyfield’s corner for the famous fight with Buster Douglas. After Douglas had beaten Tyson in the upset of all upsets, Buster celebrated by eating and then eating some more. As when he stepped on the scale for the weigh-in the night before the Holyfield fight, looking rather flabby, Duva shouted: “We won! we won!”
The next night, Holyfield knocked out Douglas to win the heavyweight championship. Duva trained or managed 19 different champions. He died in 2017.
Charlie Francis tops the page for the letter F. He is best known for training Ben Johnson and for his part in the steroid scandal of 1988. We first met in 1987 at the world track and field championships, where he was adamant Johnson was clean. Our relationship didn’t start well but over the years, the more we got to know each other, the more I realized how much Francis knew about everything going on in athletic training and track and field, and when I needed context or an ability to understand something, he was the first call. Charlie died in 2010.
Wayne Gretzky’s phone number is in the G section, and I wonder how many numbers ago that was for him. Cito Gaston and Pat Gillick also on the list. Everybody is still alive in G except for Blue Jays scout, Epy Guerrero.
Stu Hart was at the top of the H page. You know him. Everyone who knows wrestling knows him. His kids wrestled, his daughters married wrestlers, his whole life was wrestling. He died in 2003, not without a fight of some kind.
Red Kelly is on the K page and Leon Mcquay is on M along one lineup from Bobby Mattick, the legendary Blue Jays voice of reason, and just above Lennox Lewis’s old manager, Frank Maloney, who is now a woman named Kellie Maloney.
Under O, there is Harry Ornest, former owner of the Argos, the
St. Louis Blues and anything else he could flip for a buck. In the pre-internet days, a large manilla envelope would arrive by mail every so often. In it, were clippings. Tiny clippings, lots of them, from a variety of sources, with Harry’s printing in the margins. He wanted to share his views and he’d spend months putting together these remarkable packages.
Ornest died in 1998, seven years after selling the Argos to Bruce Mcnall, John Candy and Gretzky. He told me he was never paid the money Mcnall owed him. What he told me earlier and forgot: He never did pay for the Argos in the first place.
You come across names to the end of alphabet, Sam Pollock in P, Rocket Richard in R, the boxing trainer, Adrian Teodorescu in T, boxing promoter Irving Ungerman in U. One last name in W.
You go past Bill Watters and Tom Watt and Brian Williams, all of whom still doing fine, and stop at Ed Whalen. I can still hear his voice, not so much doing Calgary Flames games but for the manner in which he broadcast Stampede Wrestling. Whalen was one-of-a-kind, a local newsman who suspended his daily job every Friday night for all that is professional wrestling. It is 19 years since he passed and the words “in the meantime and in between time, that’s it — another edition of Stampede Wrestling,” have never left me. Probably they never will.