St. John’s team reached top
Gonzaga students won national title on game show in 1974
The biggest scholastic success ever achieved by a high school in Newfoundland and Labrador has been almost completely forgotten now, almost two generations later.
On July 5, 1974, Gonzaga Regional High School of St. John’s won the coveted national “Reach for the Top” championship. That year, the tournament was held in St. John’s as part of the celebrations surrounding the 25th anniversary of the province joining Canada.
From its inception in the 1960s until it was dropped due to budget cuts in 1985, “Reach for the Top,” a high school quiz show, was televised by the CBC.
For teammates Peter Chafe, Tom Harrington, Sethu Reddy and Gerry Beresford, now in their late 50s, the memories are still vivid.
Beresford is the only member of the team still living in Newfoundland. He scored 120 points to lead the team to a 300270 win over Alberta in the championship.
Beresford — who went on to earn an MBA from Queen’s University — scored 65 of those 120 points for Gonzaga before Alberta even got on the board.
Teammate Peter Chafe broke a tie late in the game when he correctly answered “McCarthy” to a question about who was the U.S. commander in the Pacific during the Second World War. As it turned out minutes later, as the siren sounded to end the game, that answer was the winner.
Chafe couldn’t be reached for this article.
“I had high blood pressure in that one,” Beresford recalls of the championship.
“Sethu was trying to calm me down, but it didn’t work. I think that game and the provincial final that year against Herdman Collegiate were the only two times I scored the most points. Usually, I was quick on the buzzer, but would get the answer wrong.”
Gonzaga was a Jesuit-led Roman Catholic high school at the time, and the team’s coach was Father David Creamer.
“Father Creamer was an incredible coach,” Harrington said. “He had a real sense of organization and that was a huge part of our success. He was the biggest reason we won.”
Having the boys wear uniforms — blue blazers and grey pants — was one of the priest’s team-building ideas, Harrington said.
“I believe the year we won the championship was the first year uniforms were no longer required at the school,” he said. “Father Creamer felt it would give us a better sense of being a team and it made us look impressive for the games when we wore them. It was a great idea.”
Each team member had their own area of expertise.
“I had history, politics, general knowledge and sports,” Harrington said. “Peter, I believe, had literature and visual art, while Sethu and Gerry had math.”
Harrington lives in Toronto and is a host on CBC-TV’s “Marketplace,” but he worked in sports at CBC for years.
As if to foreshadow his future in sports, Harrington correctly answered two questions during the championship about the winners of the Stanley Cup and the world hockey championship in 1972.
“Being a live journalist, ‘Reach for the Top’ helped me a great deal,” he said.
“It was a training ground for my career. It really helped me get things right under pressure and to process information quickly.”
In 1974, Newfoundland and Labrador had not won many nationals in anything. The first one came in 1966, when the province hosted and won the national junior baseball cham- pionship at St. Pat’s Ball Park in St. John’s, followed by a Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union men’s soccer title in 1970 won by Memorial University. The Newfoundland U-18 men’s soccer team won the nationals at home in 1974.
Dr. Sethu Reddy went on to become one of the most distinguished graduates in the history of MUN’s medical school, and is now a well-known international diabetes researcher based in the United States.
“Newfoundland had won very few games at this before 1974,” Reddy said. “We went there to enjoy ourselves, but suddenly we found ourselves in the championship game. We did not go into this thinking we were going to win it.”
After having defeated Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Ontario, Newfoundland played Alberta in the championship game. The format was a singlegame knockout so there was little room for error, Reddy said.
“We thought there was a bit of ‘never show off to an outsider how smart you are,’” he recalls. “Maybe that was a part of it … a Newfoundland trait? We felt no pressure. I didn’t tell my parents how we were doing.
“Remember, too, Newfoundland had no Grade 12 at the time, either. We were all in Grade 11 and younger than the other teams. I think that Alberta thought they were going to walk all over us, but they didn’t.”
“Some of them were Grade 13s, so our team were definitely the youngest there, no doubt,” said Creamer, who now lives in Toronto. “We had incredible preparation, though.
“I remember they studied a lot of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Little things, you know. I remember one of guys studied the Statue of Liberty and its height. Sure enough, a question about that came up in a game, asking how tall it is, and we got the question right.”
“We were all in Grade 11 and younger than the other teams. I think that Alberta thought they were going to walk all over us, but they didn’t.”
Dr. Sethu Reddy