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Capturing a country through sport: Off the beaten track

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 the eighth of a 10-part series, we highlight the non-mainstream sports.

 

The hopes of the Maritime region rode on the sturdy shell of the Bluenose, which became a symbol of Canadian pride.  (Toronto Star file photo)  

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 the eighth of a 10-part series, we highlight the non-mainstream sports.

Bluenose

After international yachtsmen called off America’s Cup races in 1920 every time the wind picked up, the Halifax Herald raged about the need for “a real race — not a ladylike saunter of fair weather freaks.”

From that colourful sentiment, the great Bluenose was born.

She was built to carry the winning hopes of a Maritime region — and win she did for her entire racing career — and became an enduring symbol of national pride.

But the Bluenose was also a real fishing vessel — so real, that her name, as the story goes, came from the blue dye left behind when the Nova Scotia fisherman wiped their noses with their homemade blue-dyed mittens.

William Roue, a young marine architect, designed the magnificent Bluenose to fish for cod on the Grand Banks and race on the open ocean — and she was so far ahead of her time that she was long called the last truly great sailing ship ever built.

And she was as Canadian as could be: built at the Smith & Rhuland Shipyards in Lunenburg, made almost entirely from the forests of Nova Scotia and skippered by local Angus Walters.

He sailed Bluenose to victory to capture the International Fishermen’s Trophy in 1921 and, try as many did in the coming years to build a schooner that could beat her, Walters kept sailing her to victory until her last race in 1938.

He even kept things fair — when a competitor lost a sail, he doused his, knowing Canada’s great schooner would still win the day.

“The wood ain’t growin’ yet that’ll beat Bluenose,” he loved to say.

He was right and Bluenose, beautiful as she was fast, graced Canadian stamps and the dime long after she’d met her sad end on a reef off Haiti in 1946.

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Ed Whitlock

He trained in a cemetery near his Milton, Ont., home and ran in shoes older than many of the runners he passed in races.

Ed Whitlock didn’t use fancy gadgets, advanced training techniques or even a specialized diet. He simply ran as long as he could in training and as fast as he could in a race, firm in his belief that people can do far more than they think they can.

The most impressive of his dozens of world records — which includes the only sub-four hour marathon in the 85-plus age group — was the marathon he ran in Toronto in 2003 when he was 73 years old. He ran 2:54:49. It was the first and, so far, only time a septuagenarian has broken the three-hour barrier and, if age-graded, is considered by many to be the fastest marathon ever run.

“I hope to run for as long as I can, not particularly for my health but to be able to be something on the race scene,” he said in 2016.

Whitlock was more than something; he was one of the world’s all-time great runners right through to his last race, three months before he died of prostate cancer this past March.

FM

Cliff Thorburn

To achieve perfection is the goal of any sportsman, to accomplish the feat under the pressure of competing in a world championship is truly something.

Cliff Thorburn, the now 69-year-old native of Victoria, considered the greatest snooker player in Canadian history, became the first man to compete a maximum break at a world championship on April 23, 1983. That’s all 15 reds each followed by 15 blacks and then all six coloured balls for a 147, the Holy Grail for snooker players around the world.

First introduced to snooker as a 12-year-old when he snuck down the stairs of a bowling alley to a pool hall to watch, Thorburn became the first player from outside the United Kingdom to win a world championship when he did it 1980 and he finished that year as the No. 1 ranked played on Earth. Thorburn was not known as a flashy player, nicknamed “The Grinder” for his deliberate, methodical style of play.

FM

Northern Dancer

Northern Dancer, who won the 1964 Kentucky Derby, is ranked as one of the top 100 thoroughbred champions of the 20th century.
Northern Dancer, who won the 1964 Kentucky Derby, is ranked as one of the top 100 thoroughbred champions of the 20th century.  (The Associated Press file photo)  

Undersized athlete with the heart of a champion? Not reserved for human Canadians who have made their mark on the sports world.

The great Northern Dancer, a Bay stallion that won two-thirds of the Triple Crown in 1964 and is considered one of the greatest sires of all time, defied all odds to become a champion.

“Northern Dancer is the kind of colt who, if you saw him in your living room, you’d send for a trap and put cheese in it,” the great Jim Murray wrote of him in the Los Angeles Times. “He’s so little, a cat would chase him. But he’s so plucky there’s barely room in him for his heart.”

The heart was huge.

While officially listed at 15.2 hands high (about 157 cm), he was probably closer to 15 hands (152 cm), relatively tiny for a champion racehorse. But he is ranked as one of the top 100 thoroughbred champions of the 20th century.

FM

Doug Hepburn

He’s one of the great Canadian stories of overcoming seemingly impossible odds to become the best in the world.

Doug Hepburn was born with a club foot. The surgery to repair it left him with a withered leg. He was scrawny and his eyes crossed inward. All of these were things that made him an easy mark for bullies.

He started an intensive, self-taught weightlifting program — transforming himself from 145 pounds to 275 — and, in 1948, set a Canadian record by pressing 300 pounds and, a year later, a world record with the addition of another 45 1/2 pounds.

Still, the Canadian establishment — based in Montreal while he was in Vancouver — ignored him and he wasn’t chosen for the 1952 Oslo Olympics, which were won by an American that Hepburn had handily beaten three years earlier.

Disappointed but determined, Hepburn paid his own way to the 1953 world championships in Stockholm and surprised the world, winning the heavyweight championship. He came home to Canada as the World’s Strongest Man.

FM

Jacques Villeneuve

Jacques Villeneuve won the Indy 500 and CART crown in '95.
Jacques Villeneuve won the Indy 500 and CART crown in '95.  (LYNNE SLADKY / The Associated Press file photo)  

The bloodlines are nothing if not incredibly impressive and it’s no wonder that Jacques Villeneuve would become a champion race driver.

The son of the great Gilles Villeneuve and the nephew of his namesake, known far and wide as Uncle Jacques, there wasn’t a race circuit that Jacques Villeneuve couldn’t conquer.

He burst on the scene for many a casual fan in 1995 when he drove to a win in the prestigious Indianapolis 500 in a season that would ultimately end in the 1995 CART driving championship.

Shifting to an entirely different level and driving discipline, the now 46-year-old native of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., moved to the dominant Williams team on the F1 circuit, challenging teammate Damon Hill for the championship before winning it in 1997.

He joined Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi as the only drivers to pull off the CART-F1 feat.

FM

John Part

The music would start and it would boom throughout the room as the champion entered, the Imperial March, familiar to all from Star Wars, building to its crescendo.

And here he would come, Darth Maple, the best darts thrower Canada has ever produced.

John Part, born in Toronto in 1966 and a self-made star in a Great Britain-dominated sport, was a three-time world champion, winning the British Darts Organisation (BDO) world championship in 1994 and following that up with Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) world championships in 2003 and 2008. He was also inducted earlier this year into the PDC Hall of Fame.

Lauded not only for his skills, Part is seen as one of the true gentlemen of the sport and has a long career as an analyst, facts noted as part of his Hall induction.

He is not done as a player entirely, though, winning seven matches and his Tour card earlier this year.

“I guess I’m the everyman of darts. I’m the guy who’s played everyone,” he said then. “I’m not a superstar, but I hope that I’m what everybody could be.

“I’m probably the best pub player in the world to be a three-times world champion!”

FM

Brian Budd

It may have been a contrived, made-for-television event but Toronto-born Brian Budd was the best at it over a three-year period beginning in 1977 and proved his abilities as a great all-around athlete.

The show/event was the annual World Superstars competition, a faux decathlon-esque event pitting athletes from different sports against each other in different disciplines. Budd won three straight Canadian Superstars competitions — particularly excelling in chin-ups and the 800-metre race— and followed each of those with a win at the World Superstars contest. He was so dominant that when ABC-TV, inventors of the franchise, introduced a rule that three-time winners couldn’t compete again, Canadians were sure they did it to keep out Budd.

Budd was also a soccer star, winning seven caps for Canada and scoring twice, including the goal that set Canada on a course of a 3-0 World Cup qualifying win over the United States in 1978.

FM

Jonathon Power

He grew up playing whatever he could in the gyms that his father ran on military bases and at 12 he was told to choose a sport. For Jonathon Power, who could make a racquet sing as one of the greatest shotmakers in history, that sport was always going to be squash.

But that was far from Canada’s game, so he moved to England and France as a teenager to perfect his play and by 16 he was ready to join the pro tour.

He wasn’t just Canada’s best squash player; his fast, aggressive game made him the world’s best. When he first took the world No. 1 ranking, in 1999, he was the first player from North America to ever achieve it.

It’s a title that he traded back and forth through 2001 and, suffering the effects of injuries, Power retired shortly after regaining the world No. 1 ranking in 2006.

FM

Gerald Ouellette and Gilmour Boa

To shoot a dime-sized target from 50 metres away is hard enough. To do it with a damaged rifle is impossible.

That’s what Gerry Ouellette discovered at the 1956 Olympics when he tried to use his rifle that was damaged on the trip over to Melbourne. After he finished a disappointing 21st in one event, his teammate Gilmour Boa offered a solution: Share a rifle.

They’d both use Boa’s rifle in the 50-metre prone event, which meant taking a shot every 75 seconds to both finish within the time-limit. They more than managed that.

Ouellette, a Windsor-born marksman, thrilled the nation, winning Olympic gold in the event with a perfect score of 600, a feat that had never before been accomplished by a Canadian.

And Montreal’s Boa, who came from a family of marksmen, stood on the podium beside his teammate with his own bronze medal.

FM

Big Ben

How tough was Big Ben, the equine icon who won more than 40 Grand Prix show jumping titles with rider Ian Millar, including back-to-back World Cup championships in 1988-89?

In 1992, the chestnut gelding survived two bouts of colic and a crash between a horse trailer and a car that killed two horses. Big Ben? Won the prestigious Spruce Meadows later that year and a Grand Prix two months after the accident.

Originally named “Winston” when born at a farm in Northern Belgium, Big Ben enjoyed his greatest year in 1989, winning Grand Prix events in Bordeaux and Stuttgart, making Millar the No. 1 rider in the world.

Big Ben retired in 1994 and was euthanized due to another bout of colic in 1999 at 23 years old.

FM

Whitney McClintock

Whitney McClintock, part of water skiing's royal family, started racking up world championships as a teen.
Whitney McClintock, part of water skiing's royal family, started racking up world championships as a teen.  (Rick Madonik / Toronto Star file photo)  

Being a McClintock means water skiing well and early. The sport is a family dynasty going back generations, so it’s no surprise that Whitney McClintock was pulled along the shore of Puslinch Lake, near Cambridge Ont., just before her second birthday.

Her uncle Joel was a water ski world champion, as was her aunt Judy, who held dozens of national records. Her brother Jason was a Canadian champion multiple times over and her parents Jeff and Sherron skied nationally in Canada and U.S., respectively. There was a lot riding on the family name and she more than lived up to it.

She was barely a teenager when she first made the national team and it wasn’t long before she was picking up world titles — six in all.

At the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games, the highest international level for the sport that’s not an Olympic one, Whitney McClintock won medals in every discipline — slalom, trick and jump — and the overall gold medal.

FM

Sandy Hawley

Sandy Hawley became the first jockey to ride 500 winners in a season in 1973.
Sandy Hawley became the first jockey to ride 500 winners in a season in 1973.  (graham bezant / Toronto Star file photo)  

The retirement date — July 1, 1998 — was fitting to celebrate a truly remarkable career of a Canadian icon.

Sandy Hawley, who retired on Canada Day nearly two decades ago, had an astonishing career with 6,450 wins on 31,456 mounts, 18 riding titles at Woodbine, and four Queen’s Plate wins, joining only Avelino Gomez and Robin Platts at that lofty total.

In 1973, he became the first jockey to win 500 races in a one year, breaking a record held by the legendary Bill Shoemaker and one of four times he led North America in total wins. The only thing that eluded him was a Triple Crown win — he had two third-place finishes in the Kentucky Derby and a second in each of the Belmont and Preakness Stakes.

But he was Canadian through and through. While he was riding in California, the lifelong hockey fan got a job as the penalty timekeeper for the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, an ice-level view of a game he loved.

FM

Georges St-Pierre

Pound for pound, Georges St-Pierre is perhaps the best fighter in UFC history.
Pound for pound, Georges St-Pierre is perhaps the best fighter in UFC history.  (Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)  

Mixed martial arts is a brutal and bloody sport but Georges St-Pierre brought grace to it.

At the peak of his career, he was the best in the world in the octagon but he was also the incredibly rare fighter who held broader public appeal beyond the diehard fans.

Montreal’s St-Pierre is the greatest welterweight of all time and, for many Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, the greatest fighter in the history of the sport.

In 2013 when he stepped away from the octagon he left with one of the longest winning streaks ever, his impressive 25-2 fight record, and having set an example for his sport and beyond by advocating strongly for better testing to catch those using performance-enhancing drugs.

FM

Tommy Ryan

That Tommy Ryan sure knew how to find a sport and carve out his niche in it.

The Guelph-born Ryan was running the Toronto Bowling Club in the downtown core in 1909 — that was after he’d run a pool hall at the same location — when customers complained the 10-pin game was a bit too tough for them.

Ryan cut the pins down from their original size and threw half of them away, developed easy-to-throw balls, inventing the most unique of Canadian sports — five-pin bowling.

And when the patrons became so good at the sport that they scattered pins hither and yon, Ryan came up with idea of putting a rubber ring around the pins because too many were bouncing out the windows of his establishment.

It might have been a bit of surprise that Ryan had time to invent the game, Something of a Man About Town, he ran an antique gallery and auction house and served years as a judge with the Miss Toronto pageant.

FM

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