Village Squire, 1976-07, Page 33I'm Canada's answer to Charlie Brown
BY KEITH ROULSTON
With the Olympics scheduled for Montreal
this month all the attention is turning to
things athletic. It's a time when all the
middle-aged, beer guzzling, cigar chewing,
pot jellied men and their ham -hipped wives
remember way back.when they had the talent
to go all the way, but ... (fill in your own
excuse).
Well let me go on record as plainly stating I
was not one of the great white hopes of
Canadian sport who somehow got lost along
the way. I w.as instead, the Charlie Brown of
Canada when it came to_sport.
In that way I'm typically Canadian (really
Charlie Brown represents lacklustre Can-
adians far better than over -achiever Yanks). I
was a jock of all sports, master of none. Heck,
I couldn't even pick a winner when it came to
cheering for a professional team. In the past
year, for instance, I've been caught cheering
for the Toronto Argonauts (I've stuck with
them through thin and thinner for 20 years),
Toronto Toros and Montreal Expos. Between
the. three of them, you could almost count
their wins on the fingers of one hand.
I wa,, an even bigger flop when it came to
participating in sports
My first love was, of course, hockey. I was
great on the old farm pond in the winter. I
could fake out every defenceinan in sight and
my bullet shot was deadly. The problem was
that when I transfered my skills to the hockey
rink in town something was lacking: I think it
was the fact the defensemen could skate
better than my six-year-old brother and the
goalies were sharper than the family dog that
I was used to in goal.
As I grew older, the equipment
manufacturers nearly had to design new
equipment for me: I needed more padding in
the posterior of my hockey pants because the
bench got a little hard. The only time I ever
saw ice time was when we were 10 goals up or
10 goals down. It was invariably the latter
since we called it a close game if we weren't
losing by more than 9. Finally, when I
reached about 14, they asked me to find
another sport. The players were getting
bigger you see and they needed my space on
the bench. It was probably the greatest
contribution I ever made to my team.
I tried football for a while. We didn't have a
high school team but we played at noon hour
and after school in pick-up games. We played
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real tackle football...without any helmets or
equipment. At five foot eleven and 140
pounds, I soon learned to 'be the best open
field runner in the game...it sure beat getting
tackled by a 200 -pound lineman.
Track and field, now that was the sport at
our high school. All the same guys who'd
been the heros in hockey, turned out to be the
heros at track. I faithfully entered the
100 -yard dash every year and came in next to
last. I never bothered with the high jump
because I figured the school athletic budget
didn't allow for replacement of too many
crossbars and with my long, gangling legs, 1
was a regular crossbar smasher. I tried the
long jump, but usually tripped over the
takeoff, plank.
One Year, just to change the, boredom, I
decided `o enter the 220 yard dash and 440
instead o' the 100 yard. The 220 was about as
bad as the 100 only more painful because it
lasted lon>>ter. The 440, however, was a snap.
Only two d'her people were crazy enough to
take part. One was a super athlete, the other
even a worse dud than me. We knew who was
going to win', We also knew that he'd been in
about 20 other events that day and didn't
need any more exertion ►h'n necessary. So
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VILLAGE SQUIRE/JULY 1976, 31