A Runner’s Journey 9781487541057

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PRAISE FOR A RUNNER’S JOURNEY “Bruce Kidd’s journey goes well beyond an athlete’s striving to reach the finish line first. His memoir is really about the lifelong education of an advocate and the crucially important discovery that sport is essential to the human narrative.” Scott Russell, host of the Olympic Games, CBC Television, and co-host of CBC Sports’ Road to the Olympic Games “Bruce Kidd was never one to ‘just stick to sports.’ It didn’t take him long to recognize the sports world didn’t treat everyone equally: women, people of colour, and those who were refused an education because they were seen as commodities. Kidd was never afraid to fight for the voice of the athlete to be heard, and he continues to ensure sport is a gift that can be given to everyone.” Andi Petrillo, sports broadcaster and co-host of CBC Sports’ Road to the Olympic Games “This book takes you on a journey through many of the most significant social and political movements of the last 70 years, all through the lens of sport. In doing so, Bruce illustrates how sport has shaped and been shaped by these movements, giving us a rich understanding of the recent origins of sport as we experience it today. Bruce’s journey from celebrated athlete to activist and ally for ethical, inclusive, and accessible sport offers valuable lessons about the process of creating change and the ongoing need for visionary, committed leadership within sport and beyond.” Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, CEO, Canadian Women & Sport “Bruce’s book is yet another accomplishment that is consistent with the bravery, boldness, and humanity he has displayed through his journey in sport. He has succinctly and honestly captured his over 70 years of participation as an athlete, activist, critic, observer, and torch-bearer. This book, like Bruce’s story, will remain a symbol of his legacy, both known and unknown, for many generations of leaders in sport and beyond.” Dasha Peregoudova, lawyer and past president, AthletesCAN, the Association of Canada’s National Team Athletes

“A Runner’s Journey is a reminder that sport not only provides some of the greatest joys of contemporary life but is also a vehicle for dialogue and cooperation within and between nations. It is a reminder of the opportunities and obligations that international athletes and those working with sport in our universities have to help others less fortunate. This is lived social intervention, one of the most authoritative voices on sport in the world; a joy to read, and I encourage you to do the same.” Grant Jarvie, former chair with sportscotland, founding director of the Academy of Sport, and chair of sport, University of Edinburgh “The best memoirs do more than tell the story of an influential and celebrated life. They also say something about the complex interplay of biography and history, of self and world. Bruce Kidd’s splendid book is as much about Canadian history, culture, and politics as it is about one runner’s journey.” Richard Gruneau, professor emeritus, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University “Bruce Kidd’s journey of discovery through sport took him to the Olympic track in Tokyo and back, but it also frames a lifetime of passionate endeavour and activism in support of Canadian sport along the way. Kidd shows us how his journey as athlete and activist can be measured in deeds, struggles, triumphs, protests, and sometimes failures, but he convinces us that access to opportunity and joy in sport is a destination he always found worth striving for locally, nationally, and internationally. This book is a must-read for all those who love Canadian sport and want to better understand the political, economic, and cultural forces and circumstances that have shaped and sustained it.” Patricia Vertinsky, professor, School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia “What a life Bruce Kidd has lived – and so much of it in the public eye! Written with grace and generosity, remarkable self-awareness, and characteristic understatement, Kidd’s memoir is a front-row, first-person account of the contemporary history of Canada, Olympic sport, progressive activism, and academic engagement from a Renaissance man who himself played key roles in shaping much of it. This book, like Bruce himself, is a Canadian original and an international inspiration.” Doug Hartmann, professor and chair, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota

“Bruce Kidd exemplifies C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination as he fleshes out, through this memoir, the ways that his life and efforts as an athlete, activist, and academic have been intertwined. We learn how this approach helped him shape a preferred vision for sport locally, nationally, and internationally, while concomitantly being shaped himself by existing socio-historical realities. His story complements and expands current accounts of sport development in Canada spanning the past 70 years, while reminding us that counting on passion to fuel our actions can, at times, fundamentally alter sport and broader societal conditions.” Victoria Paraschak, professor, Department of Kinesiology, University of Windsor “One word to characterize Bruce Kidd’s memoir is panoramic. A Runner’s Journey captures the incredible breadth of Bruce Kidd’s life experiences and accomplishments. This is more than a personal memoir with an emphasis on sport. It is a history of Canadian sport from an insider’s point of view. That insider just happens to be a champion and advocate for sport as well as a critic, agitator, and activist for a more socially just sporting landscape. A Runner’s Journey could aptly be subtitled ‘The Personal Is Political.’” Douglas A. Brown, professor and dean, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management, University of Manitoba

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Aevo UTP An imprint of University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com © Bruce Kidd 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. ISBN 978-1-4875-4103-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-4104-0 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-4875-4106-4 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-4105-7 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: A runner’s journey / Bruce Kidd. Names: Kidd, Bruce, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210200030 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210200049 | ISBN 9781487541033 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487541040 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487541057 (PDF) | ISBN 9781487541064 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Kidd, Bruce. | LCSH: Runners (Sports) – Canada – Biography. | LCSH: Political activists – Canada – Biography. | LCSH: Sports – Political aspects – Canada. | LCSH: Sports – Social aspects – Canada. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. Classification: LCC GV1061.15.K53 A3 2021 | DDC 796.42092 – dc23 Printed in Canada “Runner,” by W.H. Auden, from Later Auden by Edward Mendelson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Copyright © 1962 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for our publishing activities.

For my parents, Margaret and Roby, and Ross, Alice, David, and Dorothy

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CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART 1: THE EDUCATION OF AN ATHLETE 1  A Boy in the Beach 11 2  I Become a Runner 25 3  Choosing Canada 39 4  Canadian Hero 51 5  Commonwealth Champion 64 6  A Cheer for Amateurism 77 7  Great Expectations 89 8  Lane Three 101

PART 2: THE EDUCATION OF AN ACTIVIST 9  Gap Year 115 10  Recreation for All 129 11  The Olympic Project for Human Rights  143 12  The “Canadian Sports System” 155 13  Wafflers and Jockrakers 167 14  The Political Economy of Sport 181

x Contents

PART 3: MY STRUGGLE FOR CANADIAN SPORT 15  Dream Job 197 16  Critical Support for the Olympics 211 17  The Boycott That Worked 231 18  Feminist Ally 251 19  Recovery Projects 267 20  Struggling for the Olympic Ideals 281 21  A Sports System We Can Be Proud Of 297 22  Renewing Varsity 309 23  A New Social Movement 328 24  Runner with a Worldview 342 Notes 347 Index 353 Photos follow page 230

INTRODUCTION

The camera’s eye Does not lie But it cannot show The life within, The life of a runner, Or yours or mine, That race which is neither Fast nor slow, For nothing can ever Happen twice, That story which moves Like music when Begotten notes New notes beget, Making the flowing Of Time a growing, Till what it could be At last it is, Where Fate is Freedom, Grace, and Surprise. – W.H. Auden, from Runner, directed by Don Owen, National Film Board, 1962

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Sports are a journey of discovery. I’ve rarely run a race, played or watched a game without learning something new. Through sports, I have learned and relearned about desire, strength, and vulnerability. In addition to the great joy that they bring, sports have taught me about other people, their places and cultures. They have encouraged me to dream and see the world. I’ve spent a lifetime of learning through sports. In my teenage years, enabled by family and community, I became a successful distance runner, learning to win and set records across Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia, expanding my horizons in the process. It was a time when conventional wisdom had it that teenagers could not run longer distances without damaging their health. I paved the way for others like me by showing that, when properly trained, we could compete in endurance events as well as anyone. Along with Bill Crothers, Abby Hoffman, and Harry Jerome, I helped jumpstart a rejuvenation of Canadian fortunes in international sport. We sought to challenge the world and we did. We also sought to change Canadian sport so that the next generation could have better opportunities. I began with very private goals, competing for myself and my teammates and coaches in the East York Track Club and the University of Toronto. With the media attention and honours I received, I acquired representational status. Canadian Press twice selected me “Canada’s Male Athlete of the Year.” The National Film Board and the CBC made films about me. As athletes have for thousands of years, I became a living symbol of Canadian youth, the schools I attended, and my city, province, and country. Lorne Michaels, the iconic Saturday Night Live producer, once told Meric Gertler, the president of the University of Toronto, with a groan, that “every Canadian parent in the 1960s expected their children to live up to the image of Bruce Kidd.” Strangers still stop me on the street or on the subway to ask, “Bruce, do you still run?”

Introduction 3

It took me a while, but I learned to accept that such honours brought responsibilities. As I discovered more about how sports were organized, I learned that not everyone enjoyed the charmed life I did, and that women, Indigenous Peoples, Blacks and other people of colour, members of the LGBTQ community, persons with disabilities, and others faced open discrimination and vastly unequal opportunities. I became convinced that Canada could do much more to provide sports for all its citizens. My parents always encouraged me to take responsibility for the activities in which I engaged, so using my celebrity (and the protection of white, straight, male, middle-class privilege) to make change seemed the logical next step. It was the start of lifelong advocacy for greater public investment, more competent leadership, and genuine accessibility, in both high-performance and grassroots sports. It was not just access to sport that I began to see critically, but the way sports were organized. Alongside the undeniable benefits, I realized that sports empower some while disempowering others. Sports have enabled terrible abuses. I gradually became an ally of the maltreated. When I began to speak out about the ills of sport, often angrily, it wasn’t always appreciated. Athletes like me were expected to “stay positive” and speak in platitudes. Conn Smythe, the founder of the Toronto Maple Leafs, lectured me on loyalty. Sportswriters like Dick Beddoes of the Globe and Mail blasted me as “immature.”1 For a while, it seemed that “controversial” was my first name. Varda Burstyn, my partner at the time, said that I was at once “the golden haired-boy and enfant terrible of the Canadian sports establishment.” Some thought I hated sports. Those who did hate sports were disappointed that I did not abandon them. What both groups misunderstood was that I loved sports and just wanted to make them better. Slowly, with mentoring and trial and error, I learned to present my ideas in a less confrontational, more constructive way.

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I developed a series of positions that simultaneously held sports up to critical scrutiny while seeking to maintain and strengthen their best features. I call this strategy “critical support for sports.” With teammates, friends, and students, I undertook a number of initiatives to change Canadian and international sport. Gradually I was recruited into decision-making bodies and positions of leadership, so I came to have opportunity to put our ideas into practice. I helped create new legislation, new programs, and new facilities, and learned further from the process about how to make change. It helped enormously that I was able to study and then forge a career teaching, writing, and organizing about sports at the University of Toronto. This memoir is about why sports mean so much to me, what I learned from them, and why I’ve always fought to make them more equitable and humane. It bears witness to the remarkable changes I have lived through in more than 70 years of participation. I’ve written my story in three parts. Part 1, “The Education of an Athlete,” recounts my experiences, triumphs, and disappointments during my earliest years and the height of my career in track and field. Part 2, “The Education of an Activist,” follows the circuitous route I took to sports activism and academic sports studies. When I retired from intense training and competition, I had always believed that I would forge a career outside sports. For the next eight years, I tried to do exactly that, pursuing adult education, the civil service, and elected office. I learned enormously from those ventures. But I was drawn back repeatedly into sports as a volunteer, journalist, and organizer. I became more convinced than ever that sports were worth fighting for, and gradually learned to make my voice heard. I realized that I was happiest when I tried to do so. Part 2 ends with my appointment in 1973 to a full-time faculty position in sports studies at the University of Toronto.

Introduction 5

Part 3, “My Struggle for Canadian Sport,” recounts my career in sports studies, and my various efforts to change Canadian and international sports as I became a leader in the institutions I sought to change. Over the course of my life, both Canadian society and Canadian sport have changed dramatically. Each period of the memoir coincided with very different conditions and beliefs. While it has not always been possible to connect the larger social changes in any detailed way to my own story, they were always on the horizon. My best performances in track and field occurred during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when amateur sport enjoyed media coverage and public attention almost as great as the professional teams. No amateur athlete, coach, or administrator was paid, and taking money for anything other than specified expenses could result in a lifetime ban, so our involvement was always part-time. The application of science to performance was in its infancy. But we were all in the same boat and for those of us who could afford it, we thrived. It was at the end of two decades of steady, post-war economic growth and significant improvement in people’s lives, much of it enabled and financed by the Canadian state. It was a hopeful time. My journey to sports activism and an academic career took place during the turbulent years around the 1960s, and the rise of Quebec, English-Canadian, and Indigenous nationalism; the powerful youth mobilizations of the nuclear disarmament, civil rights, women’s and gay liberation, and environmental movements; and internationally, the decolonization of the Global South. These political and cultural ambitions inspired us to “change the world and change it now!” I was convinced that we could do that in sports. The late 1960s saw the rapid increase in full-time training in sports, driven by Cold War rivalries and the entry of the state into the direction and financing of high-performance sport. It was during this period that the federal, provincial, and territorial

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governments completely transformed the volunteer, amateur institutions of the Olympic sports, creating what we know today as the “Canadian sports system.” At the same time, capitalist sports grew tremendously, fuelled by television, advertising, and publicly subsidized stadia and arenas. Unionization helped players win an increasing share of the revenues. The various projects I recount in part 3 took place over more than 40 years, during many stunning transformations. They include the end of apartheid, the end of the Cold War, the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and, in Canada, the achievement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Canadian sports system became preoccupied with staging Olympic and other major games as a strategy of domestic development, and the Olympics became highly commercialized. Since the 1980s, the world has been remade by the widespread acceptance of the free-market fundamentalism championed by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan. That enabled a revival of unfettered capitalism, a series of defeats for organized labour, free trade, and a sharp reduction in taxes, all of which significantly reduced the potential of the liberal-democratic state to bring about economic and social equality. It has starkly increased the inequality of income and wealth, turning back the progress of the previous 40 years. COVID-19 has frighteningly exacerbated those inequalities. The turn to free-market ideologies contributed to a sharp decline in the social movements focused on broad social transformation. It stunted the possibilities for the further democratization of societies. Like many former activists, I responded by narrowing my focus to constituency politics – in my case, sport and the university – “trying to change the system from within.” I learned to work within the constraints of public institutions forced into incrementalism. At the same time, the neo-liberal focus on individualism and the creative resistance of women, people of colour,

Introduction 7

Indigenous Peoples, sexual minorities, and persons with disabilities provided new energies for equality and equity. People first urged me to write an autobiography when I was a teenage track star. Some even offered to write it for me. In recent decades, my wife, Phyllis Berck, my brothers, Ross and David Kidd, and my track teammate Brad Hill revived the idea and kept up the pressure. I kept putting it off. I had my hands full with other projects and was reluctant to stir up forgotten emotions. Writing about your life is not for the faint of heart, especially when you have letters, photographs, school records, clippings, audio tapes and films, meeting minutes, reports, and memorabilia going back to your early childhood. I have no conscious memory of deciding to document my life in this way, but I kept almost everything. In the process of research, I discovered a ton about the person I once was. At times, it was embarrassing to read the shrill tone of some of the early letters and speeches, but I found much that was pleasantly surprising. I discovered that as early as high school, long before I made it a cause, I was writing to public officials calling for more accessible sport. I also discovered that my memory was better than I feared. As I began to experience “seniors’ moments,” forgetting familiar names and what I had done yesterday, I began to worry that I had exaggerated some of the stories I had told many times. Then I found the confirming documents in my boxes. Those papers provide a major source for this memoir. While I have referenced direct quotes from newspapers and public documents, I have not provided citations for quotes from memory, or letters or documents in my personal papers. They are still being catalogued in the University of Toronto Archives. My boxes also provide confirmation of the many fascinating and affectionate relationships I’ve enjoyed through sports, far too many to mention in this memoir. They constitute my richest reward from sports.

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It was Melanie Belore who really got me started, sitting me down to talk about what I wanted to say and sending me an outline. Marnee Gamble, the special media archivist at U of T, put my papers, once gathering dust in different basements and attics, in a form that I could easily access. She has offered invaluable advice along the way. Zoe Weber prepared the initial finding aid. The other U of T archivists were warm and supportive when I camped out in a carrel there. Phyllis, Ross, and Brad were my initial readers, responding to every draft chapter with corrections and advice. Peter Donnelly, Russell Field, Kathy Kelley, Rob Pitter, John Reeves, and Paul Thompson provided extensive comments, and Varda Burstyn, Paul Carson, Rick Gruneau, Donald Njelesani, Patrick Okens, Lorna Read, John Smart, and Brenda Zeman read selected chapters. My sister Dorothy listened supportively throughout. Len Husband of the University of Toronto Press gave me several important tips at an early stage of the writing and shepherded the book through production. Michael Levine took notes for me when I travelled for track and field in the 1960s and has been a friend and confidant ever since. He helped tremendously in the final stages. I am extremely grateful to them all. I am indebted to my wife, Phyllis Berck, who shares my love of sport, physical activity, and the Olympics. She has supported me unstintingly throughout. While an autobiography covers an entire life, a memoir is more thematically focused. This is about my life in sport.

1 A BOY IN THE BEACH

Running, running, running. That’s my earliest memory. I ran endlessly, joyously, with an exhilaration I can still feel, back and forth in my parents’ tiny apartment on the upper west side of New York. They said I drove them crazy, but I refused to stop. I was three. I also remember running endless laps around the beautiful park overlooking the Hudson River that encloses Grant’s Tomb while my mother was teaching my brother Ross, 22 months younger than me, to walk. At the time, my father Roby (James Robbins Kidd, but known to everyone, even his children, as Roby) was studying for his doctorate in adult education at Columbia University. My mother Margaret (Mom) was raising two boys and making ends meet on a graduate student’s stipend, having put her career as a child care specialist on hold. Before she married Roby, she ran Day Care #1, the Canadian government’s first wartime centre in Montreal. My other vivid first memory comes from the mass vaccinations that the NYC Health Department delivered in the spring of 1947 to combat an outbreak of smallpox. We inched forward in a snaking lineup, with anxious faces and children’s cries. My parents said the needles were important so that no one would get sick. I was proud not to cry. It was the largest vaccination campaign to that date in US history, with 600,000 doses administered the first week, my first public health experience.

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Little did I know that running and population health would be such strong currents in my life. I have always held a soft spot in my heart for New York City. I never lost a race there. Sports were in the air in the east end of Toronto when we moved back to Canada in late 1947, at least for boys. They quickly became the focus of my life. We lived in a wartime bungalow on Warden Avenue, then in a brick two-story on Kingston Road, just west of Main Street. In 1951, after my sister Alice was born, with my brother David on the way, we moved to a still larger house on Neville Park Boulevard, just 100 yards from Lake Ontario, a block away from the iconic Waterworks (the H.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant) and the Scarborough Bluffs. It was safe and uncomplicated for a child. The Beach was a world apart, a long way from the bustling city of Toronto. Lake Ontario, no matter how stormy, always had a calming influence on me. She became my muse, and as I walked, ran, and cycled mile after mile along her shores, it often felt that she was my best friend. My mother believed that as long as it wasn’t raining, we should be playing outside. That was easy for me – I had sports. There wasn’t a sport that I didn’t try to play, and many I made up myself. We played in the driveway and a backyard rink I flooded myself. I repaired more than my share of broken windows. We played on streets, in parks, and along the beach, and took part in formal games in schools, churches, and playgrounds. At the Waterworks, the grassed-over filtration tanks provided perfect playing fields. The games there, and the schemes we pursued to get up on the roof to retrieve lost balls, are still celebrated among a group of us (the self-professed “Waterworks Boys”) who stay in touch. We had so much fun. The only thing I didn’t like was having to leave a game to go home for supper. We played with the family, including my parents and their friends, other youth from the neighbourhood, and other teammates and competitors on organized teams. When we lived on



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Kingston Road, Ross and I played baseball and ball hockey endlessly in the backyard and the huge vacant lot created out of the old Ames Estate. Until it was built over for housing, it ran from our house down the hill to my first school, Williamson Road. When I was in kindergarten and Grade 1, I could toboggan all the way to school, tying up at the back fence of the schoolyard and then, at lunch and after classes, pulling the toboggan up the hill home. We also tobogganed down the hill across the street until that ravine was filled up with housing. During the summer, I caddied for my father when he and his friends played golf at the Cliffside Golf Course south of Kingston Road, east of Birchcliff Avenue, until that too was bulldozed for housing Toronto was in the throes of post-war expansion. To the north and east of us in Scarborough, suburban housing estates, new industries, shopping malls, roads, sewers, parks, and playgrounds were constantly under construction to accommodate population expansion from the baby boom, immigration, and the pent-up desire for a better life after Depression-era and wartime austerity. During the mid-1950s, when the Waterworks were doubled in size, the site was our adventure playground. At one point in Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant novel about the original Waterworks construction in the 1930s, In the Skin of a Lion, the protagonist, Patrick, is shocked to realize that he’s crawling under the lake along a newly poured concrete in-take tunnel. I once had the same startling experience. The Beach had a well-deserved reputation for sports. It was fiercely British, with professional, skilled working-class, and small business families living side-by-side, unabashedly Christian and white in origin and background. Two world wars had only strengthened its attachment to Britain. When King George VI died in 1952, my stern Grade 3 teacher, Miss Fitzgerald at Balmy Beach School, cried and cried. While other parts of the city had been experiencing non-British immigration since the 19th century, and

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had begun the innovative accommodations that prefigured the “multi-culturalism” that characterizes Toronto today, none of that was happening in the Beach. There was only one Black and one Jewish family in my high school, Malvern Collegiate. My mother caused a stir in St. Aidan’s Anglican Church when she took a Bengali graduate student who was boarding with us to services. In the 1961 census, 91 per cent of males were either Canadian- or British-born. Like Britain, the Beach was revered as the “home of sports.” Sports were by far and away the most followed and supported form of public culture. There were cherished facilities (Balmy Beach Canoe Club, Kew Gardens, Pantry Park, Woodbine Racetrack, Grand Trunk Field, and after 1954, Ted Reeve Arena), and famous teams like Tip Top Tailors, which won the 1949 world fastball championship, and the Balmy Beach football team that (until 1954) regularly challenged for the Grey Cup. For boys, there were strong school, playground, church, and other community programs. It seemed that famous athletes lived on every street. I was a delivery boy for many years, first groceries, then pharmacies, then the Globe and Mail. I loved those jobs. They gave me confidence, spending money, and experience in interacting with people of different backgrounds. I could always boast about the current and past stars who came to the door. At one time or another, Olympic rower Roy Nurse; Argonaut greats Peter Bennett, Ab Box, and Alex Ponton; Maple Leaf hockey captain Sid Smith; and Maple Leaf baseball star Bobby Porter were customers. None of them talked about their exploits but we knew. While the Beach also produced Glenn Gould and Teresa Stratas, they were outliers, as the accomplished literary critic Robert Fulford often noted. He couldn’t wait to get out of there. I learned the basic skills and rules from my parents, their friends, and neighbours. My father, two uncles, an aunt, and many of their



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friends had been leaders in the YMCA, and they all encouraged my interest in sports. So did my mother, who played sports in school and university, and was an avid swimmer and skier. One of my father’s classmates at Sir George Williams University, Howard Langille, opened a ski hill near Dagmar, Ontario, and before we got a car, we would take the “ski train” up there on weekends. Other friends of my parents, John and Betty Madsen, had turned a barn in Unionville into a well-equipped gymnasium and taught educational gymnastics in the Danish folk school tradition. We would go by train to spend afternoons climbing and jumping. I learned to swim at the Broadview Y and at Geneva Park, the Y’s conference centre on Lake Couchiching where we would take a cottage every summer. Juri Daniel, who subsequently hired me to teach in the School of Physical and Health Education at the University of Toronto, taught me to swim. We learned and played all manner of field games at Y day camps in the Don and Highland Creek valleys, and canoed and swam at United Church and Y stayover camps in Muskoka (Tobowobo, Pine Crest), Haliburton (Wangoma), and Howe Sound (Elphinstone) in British Columbia, where my father had been a counsellor. I learned an appreciation of leadership and what I would call “optimist sporting values” from the Y. While we were mostly on our own in organizing games in the neighbourhood, adult influence was never far away. If your parents weren’t around, other adults would step in to stop a fight. My parents and their friends followed baseball, hockey, and football and talked about them all the time. If there was a game on the radio or TV during my deliveries or collections, people would invite me in to listen to, watch, and discuss a few plays. Although my father had left Saskatchewan, the province of his birth, at the age of four, he always cheered for Saskatchewan and other western Canadian teams. We listened to Foster Hewitt (hockey) on the CBC, Wes McKnight (football) on CFRB, Joe Crysdale (baseball) on CKEY,

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and Rex Stimers (St. Catharines’ Teepees hockey) on CKTB. Until we got a TV, I cultivated friends with sets to watch sports. I read the sports pages avidly, and as soon as I earned enough from my part-time jobs to pay for subscriptions, signed up for the Hockey News and SPORT. I watched as many games in person as I could. My parents introduced me to Kew Gardens, where Tip Tops’ star Charlie Justice pitched, Varsity Stadium (Blues and Argos), Maple Leaf Gardens (Leafs, Marlies, and St. Mikes), and Maple Leaf Stadium, where the professional baseball team played. I still remember my first time at MLG and the thrill of sitting amongst a huge, loud crowd. It was the sixth game of the 1950 Mann Cup lacrosse final between the Owen Sound Crescents and the New Westminster Adanacs. Early in the game, the Owen Sound goalie, Lloyd “Moon” Wootten, pivoted to stop a shot and fractured his ankle. He had to be carried out on a stretcher. It was sickening. While New Westminster, my father’s team, won the game and tied the series, Wootten’s injury took any rejoicing off the win. We went home silenced by what we saw. Before long, my friends and I went to games on our own, walking, cycling, or by streetcar, taking advantage of children’s prices. At Maple Leaf Stadium, you could sit in the right field bleachers for 15 cents. For Sunday doubleheaders with the Marlies and St. Mikes at MLG, if you could find an adult to buy one ticket in the reds, the best seats, you could get kids’ tickets next to theirs for 50 cents. Sometimes, except for the one adult, often a complete stranger, we had the whole row. While my parents talked about other parts of Canada and the world, and, before I entered high school, twice took me across Canada to visit my grandmother on the west coast (once by train; once by car), sports taught me the most about geography, beginning with the routes and neighbourhoods I discovered on the way to games and practices. I quickly developed my own lived map of



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the city. My parents encouraged those explorations. My mother refused to give us streetcar tickets for any distance that my youngest sister Dorothy, born in 1953, could walk. We were convinced that she trained Dorothy to cover longer and longer distances! The Queen car was our gateway to the world outside the Beach. Neville Park, our street, was the end of the line, so you could always get a seat going into the city. You were never afraid of falling asleep on the way back because the conductor would wake you to let you out. I loved those streetcars, and always had a favourite seat on every model, starting with the coal-heated Peter Witts I began with. Although children’s sports have a long history, the phenomenon of “mother’s taxi” – parents organizing their lives around children’s practices and games – was only in its infancy. My parents rarely saw me play and that was the norm. If anything, it was still a time when the children watched their parents and other adults play top-level sports, mostly men but even some women (in fastball). While I competed in every sport, including hockey, rugby, football, basketball, volleyball, and track and field, softball/baseball was my favourite. That’s where I first experienced success. At ­Williamson, the bantam team made the city finals against Givens and played at the famed Sunnyside Stadium, now the site of the Boulevard Club. Although I sat on the bench, it was thrilling to be part of the team with the stands full of people. As I got older, I played for as many teams as the rules and the schedules allowed. In a single season, I could play softball for the school, a local church, and a team in one of the community leagues, and hardball for a playground team. Usually I played in the infield; sometimes I caught, and, on a few occasions, even pitched. In 1955, my peewee softball team from Kew Gardens, sponsored by Wineva Pharmacy, won the city championship. The following year, East Riverdale, the playground team I played for

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out of Greenwood Park, won the CNE’s very first peewee baseball tournament as well as the city championship. The Star’s Jim Proudfoot wrote that I “shook up North Toronto’s composure by scooting all the way home after the catcher dropped a third strike.”1 In 1957, I pitched my Blantyre Park softball team to the Scarborough championship, and East Riverdale won the city baseball championship. I threw myself into games and became extremely distraught when we lost. We got crested jackets and I wore them until they fell apart. There were terrific athletes on those teams, many of whom would go on to successful careers in other sports and the professions. Bryce Taylor (later a star Varsity Blues quarterback) became the chief surgeon at the University Health Network, John Pickett played a major role in the development of the Canada Games, and Glenn Tarver and John Brown became distinguished Toronto principals. It was all very heady. The only photos I have of myself in those years are from playing baseball. My parents preached fair play and other ideals of sport. They abhorred fighting in hockey, and my father condemned Leafs’ owner Conn Smythe for his attitude of “If you can’t beat ’em in the alley, you can’t beat ’em on the ice.” For the most part, we were lucky to have competent, responsible adults as coaches and mentors. When sports conflicted with violin, Mr. Daly at Balmy Beach always found a way to enable me to do both, even if it meant hiring a taxi to get me from a game to a music practice. John Flynn at East Riverdale was a stickler for the fundamentals and “doing it right.” He had no use for players who “just wanted to have fun.” How can you have fun, he used to say, if you’re not doing it right? John prepared me very well for the focus on training and discipline that in a very few years would dominate my life. Vince Downs was another East Riverdale coach who gave me lifelong lessons about sporting values. He had played Triple A and was a terrific instructor and a devoted Catholic. We deeply respected him.



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There was a taken-for-granted level of trash talk, anti-Semitism, racism, and ethnic slurs in east end sports, and (although it would have horrified my parents) I used to rag batters on other teams endlessly. I found I could get under their skins and make them tense up, especially if I was playing up close at third or behind the plate. I could see that it upset Vince but I rarely stopped. Then one day, when we were playing our cross-town rival Lizzies at Christie Pits, I repeatedly heckled a rather rotund boy about his weight. He just froze, swinging at one bad pitch after another. Vince stopped the game, called me aside, and said something like: “Those are Jewish boys whose mothers pressure them to eat for reasons that are too difficult to explain. If I ever hear you ever razz them again, you will never play for this team again.” From Vince, I learned to keep personal and cultural attacks out of sports. We did have coaches, though, who were so determined to win that they would leave nothing to chance. Wineva Pharmacy made it to the Ontario finals, but we lost our first game to Stoney Creek by a single run. At the second game, to be played at Dentonia Park, we showed up only to discover that coach Don MacGregor had recruited five ringers whom we had never seen before, all older, to play in our stead. It took the air out of everybody, and despite the new muscle, we lost decidedly. We never wanted to lose, but most of all, we never wanted to win by cheating. After what was otherwise a glorious season, it has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. I had loved Don MacGregor but I never went near him again. We assumed that sports were primarily for boys and men. There were capable girls around, and remarkable female athletes in the city. One of my East Riverdale teammates’ aunts played for a women’s softball team at Coxwell Stadium, and we marvelled at Marilyn Bell’s first swim across Lake Ontario in 1954. But we knew nothing about the accomplishments of women’s sports in the previous generation that have led historians to call the 1920s

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and 1930s “the golden age of women’s sports.” The Second World War, the conservative nature of post-war reconstruction, and the intensified masculinization of the commercial sports media wiped out most of those activities and the widespread media coverage they received. Women’s sport in the 1950s was at its lowest ebb in the 20th century. Given the positional construction of masculinity at the time, we would have been mortified if a girl had played for one of our teams. All our coaches were men; the best programs, facilities, and banquets were reserved for boys and men; and the sports media was almost entirely about men. One of the themes of this memoir is my journey of discovery about the pernicious gendering of sports, and the way that sports celebrate and encourage boys and men to practise the many forms of male privilege. Despite all the strong women in my life, I was oblivious to that at the time. Sport was not my only interest. I took drawing classes at the Royal Ontario Museum and drama classes at the Beaches Library. I played the violin at Balmy Beach School. My parents took us to the Stratford Festival when it was still in the tent and to Chautauqua, NY, to attend plays and concerts. Ross developed a puppet theatre at the Library and became a soloist for St. Simon’s Boys Choir. My parents and their friends included us in their politics too. They met at a student conference in Winnipeg in 1938 – she from Victoria College at the University of Toronto, he from Sir George Williams College in Montreal – and they shared an ambition common to many of their generation to remake Canadian society in a more independent, democratic, and equitable fashion. My parents considered themselves “Canadian” and so did I. My father was born in Wapella, Saskatchewan, my mother in Orangeville, Ontario. It was only recently that I learned anything about their ancestry. The Kidds were originally Protestant Irish who came to the Ottawa Valley in Upper Canada early in the 19th century to



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escape religious and political conflict. The father and grandfather of the Andrew Kidd who immigrated died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. My line of the Kidds subsequently settled in Saskatchewan. My grandmother Kidd was a Robbins, a family that arrived in Massachusetts in the early 17th century, and then moved to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, after the British conquest of Acadia. My mother’s parents were English. They came in the early years of the 20th century in hopes of a better life. It is now sobering to realize that these proud family narratives were enabled by the forced removals of the Indigenous Peoples and the Acadians in the succeeding waves of British settlement. I have often wondered how my ancestors interacted with the Indigenous Peoples whose lives they crossed. I loved my parents and imbibed their values and preferences with little question. They were highly critical of the uptight, prejudiced nature of Toronto society, especially in the conservative Beach. They were confident that they could change that society, and I got that from them too. They wanted to reduce the lingering British and growing American influence upon Canada, and contribute to a society that responded primarily to Canadian needs and aspirations. They taught us that we had every right, even obligation, to change the world in the directions that made most sense to us. After he got his doctorate, Roby became the executive director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. He was an incessant campaigner for more accessible public education, particularly for those adults who had not enjoyed the full benefits of schooling because of economic circumstances, wartime trauma, and inadequate teaching when they were young. The conventional wisdom at the time was that “old dogs cannot learn new tricks” and that further education for adults was a waste, so he wrote a book summarizing the contrary evidence, How Adults Learn. I helped compile several tables. It was quickly translated into 14 languages.

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He also championed the CBC, the National Film Board, and the ­Canada Council, helped to establish the Canadian Film Awards, and was one of the first to call for the ambitious investment in public education, culture, and sport that became the core of the Centennial celebrations in 1967. My mother was a fierce advocate and organizer for social democratic ideas in her own right. While she was at home raising five children, she helped organize the local day care and was active in home and school. She was a motivating coach, with a saying for every occasion. As I encountered opposition to some of my ideas, I could always hear her telling me, “Don’t give up something you love because it’s controlled by idiots or your enemies.” She rolled out the welcome mat to everyone – “It takes all kinds,” she’d say if we wondered about someone, so our house was always teeming with interesting people. The focus of family life on Neville Park was dinner, held around a large, rectangular office table that my father painted royal blue. It seemed like every evening, often with friends and the U of T and Ryerson students who boarded with us, they probed us about our daily adventures. They shared their own triumphs, hopes, and fears, plotted and schemed about new projects, and raged about the politics of the day. There was lots to be angry about, and, during the persecutions of the McCarthy period and its reach into Canada, even fearful about, but they always had plans for fighting back. Their friends added to our sense of Canada. E.A. “Ned” Corbett, a pioneer early adult educator, took us regularly to his cottage on the Rouge River, just north of the city, where we could play in the woods. He kept us spellbound with tales of prairie hardship and courage during the dustbowl and Depression of the 1930s when he toured small towns giving “magic lantern” lectures. The community of ideas and history my parents and their friends created was another huge part of my childhood, experienced as



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inseparable from sports and other activities. Not surprisingly, social studies and history became my favourite subjects. I still have the seven scrapbooks I kept in Grade 8, with press clippings and observations on the Pipeline debate, the upheavals in the Kremlin, the Middle East, and the decline of colonialism. While my father tried to stay clear of electoral politics – his job required him to lobby governments of every stripe – two of my parents’ best friends, Alf and Pauline Best, were active in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the precursor to the New Democratic Party. Mr. Best ran in the federal elections of 1957 and 1958. He was one of the most public-spirited men I ever knew. He taught us that public service, volunteering, and giving back to the community were among the highest values. I threw myself into his campaigns, distributing leaflets, putting up signs, and trying to explain the CCF’s promise of a redistributive tax system. Electoral politics was even more competitive than sports. The family joke was that I was primarily attracted to the pop and doughnuts you could get in the committee rooms – my mother was death on junk food at home – but I loved the idealism of the CCF and the sense of fighting for the underdog. While I knew that there were other parties, I could never understand why anyone would not vote CCF. I always wore my heart on my sleeve. During the 1958 federal election, our history teacher, Red Gillmore, conducted a class poll about which party would form the next government. Most of the ballots correctly predicted the Conservative Diefenbaker landslide, a few said another Conservative minority, while mine called for a CCF majority. It was supposed to be a secret ballot, but when he got to mine, Mr. Gillmore had no doubt. He held it up to the class, looked at me, and said something like, “Bruce, are you crazy!?” While all this sounds idyllic, there were times of incredible boredom and restlessness, and at those moments, I became a challenge to those around me. Ted Yard, the director of Camp

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Pinecrest, wrote my father that I “tired easily of the conventional entertainment and program.” My parents worried that I might become a “problem child,” even a delinquent. Just before I took up running, my father wrote me a long letter reminding me that you have a good mind and unless you use it fully you are certain to be restless and discontented. Any capacity that can’t be used is likely to make the owner pay in some way. So developing new interests, trying out or learning new things that you don’t know much about, talking to people who know more than you and particularly keeping up with the world by reading!!! This will keep you alive. You ought to have at least one book going all the time – history, biography, a novel or a play, poetry, and if you do, the occasional reading of sport magazines or detective stories or MAD will be helpful. But if you read nothing else but those you will not be using your mind sufficiently and not only will it not work as well as it should it will kick up trouble for you – boredom, frustration, restlessness, etc.

2 I BECOME A RUNNER

I got into distance running because of a dare. I had always wanted to be a professional baseball or hockey player. While I competed in track and field at Balmy Beach, and even qualified for the city finals in high jump, long jump, and triple jump, I didn’t get out of the regionals in the running events, of which 220 yards was the longest. I had only seen one distance race, when family friend Martin Duckworth ran the six miles, representing Nova Scotia, in an invitational meet at Exhibition Stadium sponsored by the Canadian Legion. I did know something about the importance of the sport internationally. In 1952, Roby covered the Olympics for the CBC. That summer, he was planning a trip to Paris to visit ­UNESCO, when someone at the CBC asked him to continue on to ­Helsinki to film the Games, if they showed him how to use a movie camera. He would shoot as many events as possible and edit the footage into a one-hour documentary to air on the new television network to be launched that September. He was the first CBC Olympic television crew – producer, director, camera person, sound person, and commentator, all in one. When he returned with 15 hours of film, his nine-year-old son sat beside him through the rough cuts, exhilarated by the events and the stories.

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Roby said that the Olympics represented the highest standard of athletic excellence he had ever encountered, notwithstanding the Stanley Cup, the Grey Cup, the Mann Cup, and the World Series. He was dazzled by the performances. He regaled me with the e­ xploits of the retired Finnish champion, Paavo Nurmi, who carried the Olympic Torch in the Opening Ceremonies, and the Czechoslovakian distance runner, Emil Zátopek, who won the 5,000, 10,000, and marathon, even though he had never run the marathon before. Roby also enthused about the joyous spirit of internationalism that soared above nationalism and Cold War fears. Although the organizing committee housed teams in two separate villages, one for the capitalist countries and the other for the communists, the athletes quickly broke down the barriers and freely mingled. After Zátopek’s marathon win, the winning 4 × 400 ­Jamaican relay team carried him for a victory lap around the stadium. In my bedroom, I hung the poster Roby brought me of the Nurmi statue outside Olympic Stadium. I vowed that if I ever had a chance to get to the Olympics, I would. Another source of inspiration came from the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver. My parents bought a television so we could watch those Games, broadcast live by the CBC. While I froze in horror as marathoner Jim Peters collapsed on the track with heat stroke only a few yards from the finish, I was thrilled by the “Miracle Mile” with the world’s first four-minute milers, England’s Roger Bannister and Australia’s John Landy, running head to head. Landy surged into the lead just 250 yards into the race, running like a deer. I’d never seen anything so electrifying. Then on the last corner, with both men sprinting furiously, Landy looked left and Bannister passed him on the right and held on to the tape. It was breathtaking. Canada’s Rich Ferguson overtook New Zealand’s Murray Halberg for third. The CBC played the race again and again and I watched it repeatedly. Two summers later, my father taught a summer course



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at the University of British Columbia, and we drove out in our 1951 Ford Tudor so Ross and I could see the country and visit our grandmother in Victoria. We toured the major facilities, swam in the magnificent Games pool on the UBC campus, and saw the benefits of international sports. Track and field seemed out of the question. While I loved to run, I had so little basic speed that I became the butt of jokes among my friends at the Waterworks. One day in the late summer of 1957, Gord Cardwell wagered that he could run faster backwards over 50 yards than I could run forwards. To my further humiliation, he won. A few weeks later, in one of the first physical education classes of my Grade 10 year – in those days, we had compulsory phys ed for four straight years – every boy had to run a mile through the streets around the school. Although it felt like I was jogging, I soon found myself all alone in front, and no one ever caught up. The teacher, John Grabb, invited me to enter the Malvern harrier championships, to be held in the Massey Creek corridor the following week. The distance was one and a half miles. I challenged Gord to a rematch and the same thing happened. I took off comfortably at the start and quickly found myself alone about 50 yards in front. I won easily, with Gord far behind. I was named to the Malvern team. Although I finished well back in the city championships in High Park, Mr. Grabb assured me that I would have done much better if I had trained the way the leading runners had, and I filed that idea away. My opportunity came a few months later when my parents took us to Jamaica for the winter. They were ardent supporters of decolonization and development in the Global South, and believed that adult education could play a pivotal role. In the fall of 1957, Sir Phillip Sherlock, the vice chancellor of what was then the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, invited Roby to help prepare a plan for extension programs throughout the

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British Caribbean, as a forerunner to a Caribbean-wide university. That plan eventually led to the establishment of the University of the West Indies, with campuses in Trinidad (1961) and Barbados (1963). At the time, the nine British island colonies, plus British Guyana in South America, were discussing their respective routes to independence, and debating whether to create a single, federated West Indian Federation or go their own ways. The idea of a Caribbean-wide university was pursued in step with the proposed federation. My parents believed in what today we would call “experiential education,” that we would learn as much immersed in their projects as we ever would in the classroom. They took us to everything. It was an extraordinary time. The entire society was galvanized by the independence project, with ambitious educational and cultural initiatives in almost every place. I’ll never forget the public meeting that winter in the large square of Half Way Tree, when the erudite Norman Manley, the chief minister of the colony, and the earthy Alexander Bustamante, the previous chief minister, debated the options. The crowd filled every inch of the square, with people standing on each others’ shoulders and perched in the trees. When Manley, thought to be an advocate of the proposed federation, announced that he would remain to lead Jamaica to independence, the crowd erupted with cheers. His decision no doubt effected the ultimate failure of the federation. Dr. Sherlock and his wife, Grace, often invited us to lunch or dinner, entrancing us with stories of Jamaican history, achievement, and folklore. Many of his folk tales centred on the spider man, Anansi. I identified with the wily, tenacious Anansi because my father had always said that my name came from another story about a spider: the Scottish king, Robert the Bruce, while hiding in a cave after a significant defeat, observed a spider “trying and trying again” until it succeeded in building a web. Bruce



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was thus inspired to renew the fight and rout the hated English. Dr. ­Sherlock took us to the theatre, dance performances, and an international cricket test match. Two or three days a week, we would accompany Roby as he visited community schools, prisons, the bauxite factory, fruit and sugar plantations, sports clubs, artists, and musicians, asking how the university could help. The trip was affirmation of the worth of Jamaican society and an immersion in community development. When we were not doing field trips, we hung out on the campus, pretending to read our school books, swimming in the c­ ampus pool, and making up games on the adjoining fields. There were few other people around, and although I knew something about Jamaica’s outstanding sprinters, there was no evidence of track and field on the campus. Quite bored, I started running laps around the cricket field, imagining myself as John Landy, systematically lengthening the distance I covered each time. As I got stronger, I exulted in my ability to fly over the ground. It was an extraordinary feeling. When we returned to Toronto in the spring, I continued my workouts by running around the Waterworks. In May, I went out for the track team, and ended up winning two city championships at CNE Stadium, discovering that I loved to race as much as I love to run. I broke the record for the junior mile by running away from the field, and the 880 yards by threading through a pack down the final straightaway. It was exhilarating. The Gladstone Athletic Club, which operated out of Earlscourt Park at Lansdowne and Davenport, immediately recruited me. It took well over an hour to get there by streetcar and the club was mostly interested in road races, so I soon dropped out. Still, I wanted to keep running. That summer, after I returned from Camp Wangoma, I phoned Mr. Grabb and asked him to coach me. He said that he felt out of his depth, but that he would call Fred Foot to see if he would take me. Fred coached the East York Track Club (EYTC) and the University of Toronto and had

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coached the Canadian team at the 1956 Olympics. Fred said yes. That phone call changed my life. The EYTC was Canada’s most successful sprint club. Its members, male and female alike, regularly won Canadian and US championships and represented Canada at the Olympics, British Empire, and Pan American Games. At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, the entire Canadian men’s 4 × 100 relay team, composed of Joe Foreman, Dick Harding, Jack Parrington, and Stan Levinson, came from East York. The club also boasted exceptional athletes in the field events and the hurdles. It had been formed in 1946 by Fred and several of his teammates from the interwar Achilles Club, all of whom lived in the then township of East York (now amalgamated with the City of Toronto). They trained in the stadium beside East York Collegiate, a mecca of the sport. It was a heady atmosphere for a boy just turned 15. At East Riverdale, we talked about beating North Toronto and Lizzies, at Malvern, Lawrence Park, and Parkdale. At EYTC, they talked about competing against the world. Sprinter Stan Levensen and thrower Stan Raike had just returned from the 1958 British Empire Games in Cardiff, and many were pointing to the 1959 Pan Ams in Chicago and the 1960 Olympics in Rome. There was always an international conversation. Copies of Track and Field News, Athletics Weekly, and Leichtathletik were passed around so we knew about the major meets elsewhere. Some members had immigrated from Australia, Britain, and Europe and shared gossip from those countries. There were students from the University of Toronto and Ryerson, others home from athletic scholarships in the United States, and skilled tradesmen, industrial workers, bank managers, teachers, police officers, and civil servants. There were women too, exceptional athletes like Pat Dobie (shot and discus) and Marion Munroe (hurdles). Despite their different backgrounds and events, there was a tremendous sense of comradeship, forged



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by the love of track. On hot days after workouts, someone would bring boxes of popsicles and people would stay and talk. Almost everyone in the club was at least three to four years older than me. I felt blessed just being there. Track quickly banished the boredom and discontent of my teenage life. My parents were visibly relieved. My father subsequently told a reporter that “if he hadn’t found release and opportunity in running, we would have hoped he would have found it another way. We would have encouraged him (in anything) as long as it was reasonably constructive.”1 For the first few months, I was barely noticed. Fred called me “youngster.” For quite a while, I felt he didn’t even know my name. The workouts consisted of very fast, short intervals and time trials. Nothing was longer than 220 yards. (It would not be until the 1970s, after the Canadian government began to implement metrication, that the Canadian track community adopted the metric system.) Those first workouts would leave me gasping well behind the rest of the group. I was determined to stick it out. There were encouraging faces, especially Jim Snider, a Malvern graduate and commerce student at the University of Toronto, who lived around the corner from me in the Beach; Bryan Emery, a former diver and steamfitter who lived along Queen; and Stan Worsfold, who worked in the township’s tax office. Jim and Bryan regularly gave me rides home, nurtured me through rough spots, and shared the lore of the sport. Stan coached me in strategy, and if the parties after meets got too wild, steered me to a quiet place. (Once, in Buffalo, I slept in a bathtub.) Older athletes drove me to meets around southern Ontario. In my very last race of the summer, I lowered my personal best in the mile by several seconds, only to be beaten in a new Canadian under-16 record by Russ Evans of the Hamilton Olympic Club (who would be a rival for many years, and remains a friend today).

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My place in the club began to change that fall when Fred began experimenting with longer-interval workouts, and I came into my own. At the Melbourne Olympics, he had been dazzled by the surging tactics of the Soviet runner Vladimir Kuts, who won both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. He wondered whether he could ever train middle and distance runners and, in the fall of 1958, decided to try. Fred started with the small group of runners who had not returned to the US for scholarships or taken the fall months off (as many sprinters and jumpers did in those days). He put us on a steady diet of high-repeat 440s and 880s, at a relatively slow pace, a complete change from the length and speed of summer workouts. There were grumbles from the older runners, most of whom were quarter-milers, but I was soon asking for more. The proof of the pudding came when I ran away from the boys who beat me in the Toronto high school cross-country championship the previous year and set a new record for the course in High Park. In the Canadian cross-country championships a few weeks later in Hamilton’s Dundurn Park, I ran neck and neck with Russ Evans until the last half mile, when I burst away and he could not respond. It was my first national championship. From that point on, Fred knew my name. I became an integral part of the club, and he always set out workouts for the distances I ran. Even more beneficially, Fred gave me access to University of ­Toronto facilities at Varsity Stadium and Hart House, the best in the city at the time. During the fall and winter, when there were intercollegiate track and field and cross-country teams, Fred coached the U of T runners, while Hal Brown coached the field event athletes. Fred always sought to integrate his EYTC and U of T coaching, but the university only allowed him to bring a small number of EYTC athletes into the facilities. Only males were allowed to train at Hart House. During the winter months, EYTC training



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was therefore split, with a small group of runners at U of T and another group elsewhere, usually the corridors of an east-end school (Hartman Jones Memorial School, now Westwood Middle School) or Mutual Street Arena. It would be several years before the list of those who could train at U of T was expanded, and not until 1971 that Andy Higgins and I successfully achieved a completely integrated model with the University of Toronto Track Club. By the late fall of 1958, I was on the privileged U of T list, and began the almost daily trip to the St. George campus that became my life. U of T gave me new training partners from the Varsity program, some of whom were experienced distance runners. Ron Wallingford, then at the Ontario College of Education, was a former captain of the University of Michigan track team and an accomplished miler and two-miler. Ron subsequently represented Canada at three Pan American Games and the 1966 Commonwealth Games and for a while held the Canadian marathon record. During the season I trained with him, he helped Fred plan my workouts, took me on his own workouts, and gave me countless tips about training, nutrition, and strategy. Ron had a fierce work ethic, an encyclopedic familiarity with other runners in the sport, and a shrewd sense of race tactics. I soaked up all he said. U of T also gave me access to the broader community of highperformance athletes at Hart House, an educational and cultural centre in a beautifully designed neo-classical building in the midst of U of T’s St. George campus. In the south wing, there’s a library, music room, debates room, theatre, and a large multi-purpose hall. The north wing had a pool, two gymnasia, three specialized training rooms, squash courts, a shooting range, and a 153-yard running track. The track is considered primitive today – even in the 1960s, the famed coach of the Los Angeles Track Club, ­Mihaly Igloi, could not believe we actually trained there – but at the time, it was the only usable indoor track in the city. In effect, the north wing was a high-performance centre, with many of the best

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male athletes in the city training side by side in the weight room and changing and showering in a single, large dressing room. At one time or another, Canadian Olympians in ten different sports trained there, including Bill Yorzyk, an Olympic swim champion, and George Stulac, who represented Canada in swimming, basketball, and the decathlon in track and field. I thought they were gods. I tried to overhear their every word. Jim Snider introduced me to the rich culture of undergraduate life at Hart House. He was an engaging, irreverent, and supportive mentor. Most evenings before practice, I would meet him and several of his classmates in the Arbor Room at Hart House, as they argued about the books they read, the professors they had, and the state of the world. After workouts, I often stayed with him to attend Hart House concerts or debates. It was intoxicating. Hart House had been initiated in 1911 by Vincent Massey, then a student at U of T, with the help of the foundation derived from his family’s successful manufacturing of agricultural machinery. His idea was to inculcate a well-rounded appreciation of the arts, public policy, physical activity, and all things British into the young men of the university, based on the Oxford model. But the appalling carnage and corruption of the First World War savaged the legitimacy of the British elites, while the fighting in the trenches forged a sense of Canadian nationalism among Canadian troops. When the building opened in 1919, Massey turned Hart House into an incubator for Canadian cultural expression and Canadian solutions to world problems. He began to invest in new Canadian plays, literature, and works of art. Later, as Canada’s first Canadian-born ambassador to the United States and high commissioner to Britain, he helped shape an independent Canadian foreign policy. He also chaired a royal commission on the arts that recommended the creation of the Canada Council, which supports Canadian artists and creative



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companies. I’ve always felt that there was a straight line from Hart House to the Canada Council. It soon became my home away from home. Fred was a master organizer and coach. In his day job, he was an accountant for the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force, but track was his passion. He never missed a workout or meet, and gave endlessly to the sport. He burnt out a series of cars dragging the cinder track at East York and driving athletes to competitions all over the eastern continent. He contributed to club expenses from his own pocket and billeted athletes from out of town in the modest bungalow he lived in with his family not far from the track. Every year, he organized at least one major meet at East York, usually on Dominion Day (July 1, now Canada Day). He also served on the executive of the local branch of the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada, which governed track and field and six other sports across Canada. (It would not be until 1969 that Athletics Canada came into being as an autonomous organization, after the dissolution of the AAU.) Along with the other selfless, determined men and women who kept the strong clubs going in those years, like Harold Colby and Margaret Lord of the Hamilton Olympic Club and Paul Poce of the Toronto Olympic Club, he was a backbone of the sport. Fred exemplified the ideal of “giving back to community” I had learned from my parents and Alf Best. Fred always wore a stylish fedora. I’m sure I developed my love of hats from him. As a coach, Fred could make anyone run faster, so he attracted athletes from all over North America. He had his own ideas about speed, style, stamina, and strategy, and revised them continually from observation and trial and error. This was long before the systematic application of biomechanics and physiology to running. For the most part, he placed his athletes in races where they could excel (“Never over-match your fighter,” he always said) and gave them the confidence to succeed. He would take any athlete who

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expressed genuine interest, advised runners from other clubs, and continued to coach until his dying day. On the other hand, he had little interest in coaxing the reluctant, and was famous for telling athletes who felt sorry for themselves that if they weren’t enjoying it, perhaps they should quit. For those of us with appetite, he was a genius. During the summer months, the focus of the Canadian track and field season, EYTC was a powerhouse. Fred became a second father to me. He was always there with his stopwatch and an encouraging word, even outside in the rain, dark, or bitter cold where we often ran. His passion for the sport was infectious. We developed a powerful bond. He could sense when I was ready for harder workouts and could mediate with the older athletes when they found my workouts too demanding (they called me “monster”), developing a system where different groups would do different parts of my workouts. Before races, we discussed the other competitors and their likely strategies and tactics and developed counter-tactics for every eventuality. Later on, he gave me workouts that simulated race conditions, often secretly instructing other runners to box me in or throw in bursts when I would least expect it to prepare me for such surprises. Sometimes (scarily) driving on a highway, he showed me racing manoeuvres by accelerating, or weaving in and out of traffic. Fred invariably anticipated my breakthrough performances, giving me the confidence to keep going when (for example) I heard a lap split different than expected. He was a Canadian nationalist too. “Let’s not leave these prizes behind,” he would say when we raced in the United States. People told me that Fred was once a wild partier, but I knew him as an abstemious Christian fundamentalist. We learned not to talk about religion or politics. But on the track, we had an unbreakable partnership. Working with Fred was one of the great experiences of my life.



I Become a Runner

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Over the rest of that first year with Fred, I kept getting stronger and faster. At indoor meets at the University of Michigan, the Buffalo Armories, and the 91st Highlanders meet in Hamilton, I lowered my mile time in each race, until, in Hamilton, I ran 4:24, just a step behind Ergas Leps, an EYTC club member (and future Olympian) who starred for the University of Michigan. I won city titles again, breaking two minutes for the half for the first time. While still a junior, I lowered my mile to 4:23.6, breaking the Canadian senior high school mile record set in 1932. These races did wonders for my confidence. Despite these successes, Fred kept pointing my training towards the longer distances. At the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) championships in June, held at the Ontario Athletic Centre along the shores of Lake Couchiching, I entered and won the “open” two miles in a new record time of 9:25, beating runners several years older, leading most of the way. Three weeks later, at the O ­ ntario AAU championships in London, Ontario, I entered the senior three miles, against three of the very top runners in the country, my mentor Wallingford, Canadian champion and national team member Gord Dickson, and Dick Carmichael of the Toronto Olympic Club. The Globe and Mail said I was “overmatched.”2 Several weeks earlier, I had dropped out of a three-mile time trial with Ron after two miles because the pace seemed unbearable. In every race, there’s a moment of crisis when you have to decide whether to keep going or stop (or slow down). In London, the pace was even faster, but I stuck with them through the moment of crisis. With two laps to go, I broke away to win by a comfortable margin in a meet record of 14:34.4. It was a huge breakthrough. Track and Field News said it was a world best for under 17 by 42 seconds.3 The following week I won the junior two miles (and the under-16 880 yards) at the Canadian championships in Montreal.

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In less than a year, track had become my life. On the trip to Michigan that winter, while I sat in the back seat reading the Hockey News, oblivious to the conversation in the car, a frustrated older teammate, Bud Scott, tore it out of my hands and threw it out the window. “Youngster, if you’re serious about track, you don’t have time for any other sports,” he said. I resented it at the time, but when spring training came around, I told East Riverdale that I couldn’t play baseball that season. When I went off to Camp Wangoma to work as a counsellor-in-training, I realized that it would be my last summer away from the sport.

3 CHOOSING CANADA

When I returned to the track in the fall of 1959, it was the s­ econd time around. I quickly established a routine. My days began with the Globe and Mail, opening my bundle about 5 am in the lobby of an apartment building along Queen Street East, skimming news and sports, and then delivering papers to my 100+ customers. Those were precious moments. Because the streets were empty and the houses dark, I could dream my dreams and plan my day. After I delivered my last paper, I walked home along the beach into the path of the sun over the lake, always a joy. Then a big breakfast – my mother often supplementing the porridge and fruit with liver and a concoction she adapted from US nutritionist Adelle Davis called “Tiger’s Milk” – and the walk to Malvern Collegiate. During lunch hour, I worked on projects as president of the boy’s athletic association (in Grade 12) and the students’ council (in Grade 13). After classes, I did homework or walked my girlfriend Anne Wadge home. Then I took the streetcar to the university to train. After that, it was a ride or streetcar home, a warmed-over dinner, a bucket of hot water to soak my feet, conversation with parents and siblings, and straight to bed. I quickly realized that I was happiest when I had something concrete to do.

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With Fred, track was a four-season sport. In September, we trained on the cinder track at Varsity Stadium, then moved to the hills of Riverdale Park, then two weeks of late fall running around the Back Campus Field (where there were lights) before we went indoors at Hart House. In late March and April we returned to Riverdale Park until the cinder track at East York dried and could be graded, and that was our base until the end of August. Fred adapted his workouts from what he knew about the great Europeans – Vladimir Kuts of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia’s Emile Zátopek. For most of the year, we ran high volume, long intervals, rarely shorter than a quarter mile and sometimes a mile or more, with a short rest in between, even when we ran hills at Riverdale. Zátopek had been known to run as many as 100 × 400 metres or 25 miles of intervals in a training session. While we never did more than 8–10 miles of intervals in a single session (40 × 440, 20 × 880, 12 × 1260, and 8 × 1 mile were typical workouts), we knew there were few limits. I loved intervals, perhaps because of the rush of adrenalin as you took off each time and the jostling that simulated race conditions as you finished. I never thought it at the time, but Dave Bailey, Canada’s first four-minute miler, told me recently that I raced every interval. I loved hills, too. To this day, I want to charge up every hill I see. Occasionally Fred sent us out on the roads for long runs. Today’s runners build recovery days into the training cycle, with, say, a sequence of hard, medium, and easy. Fred believed that you should be prepared to run hard every day. If we had a meet on Saturday, we would run lightly on Friday, but otherwise, it was six days of hard workouts. There were very few easy days. On Sunday, I would run on my own along the boardwalk at the Beach. Fred could use any terrain for training, and he had such a good sense of pace that even when he measured distances by trees, he could calibrate effective workouts. For several of those years, while the metropolitan Toronto government constructed the Don Valley



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Parkway and raised the floor of Riverdale Park with garbage fill, we sprinted up hills alongside rows of waste. One spring, when the new expressway bed was packed with sand and gravel, he found a perfectly graded strip that we used for a one-mile straightaway. No one would ever mistake those arrangements for high-performance facilities, but they worked. As Fred focused more on middle and long distances, he attracted other runners who contributed to the new directions. George Shepherd was a 1960 Olympian in the 400-metre hurdles and teacher at Bloor and Jarvis Collegiate Institutes; Bill Crothers, a successful high school sprinter enrolled in pharmacy; Orville Atkins, one of Canada’s best marathoners, came from Gladstone, and Bailey also studied pharmacy at U of T. Each of them became a valued teammate. George was a stern perfectionist. Whether it was working out, organizing a meet, or preparing his lessons for class, no one worked harder. I tried to emulate his no-nonsense example. Dave and Orville also fitted right in with the diet of heavy mileage. Orville introduced me to long runs along the roads north of the city. Bill was completely different. While a ferocious competitor, gifted with natural speed, he hated long distances and slow workouts. Fred had to trick him into trying the 880, what became his signature distance. He was always getting injured, too. But when Fred began tailoring workouts specifically for Bill, with shorter intervals and fewer repetitions at a much, much faster speed, Bill thrived. He became one of the world’s best quarter- and half-milers, the silver medallist at the 1964 Olympics, undefeated on the indoor circuit year after year. It was a telling lesson that “one size doesn’t fit all,” and that, like the best education, the best training is needs-based, in discussion with those involved. After that, Fred reorganized training around three groups – the traditional sprint group, a distance group around me, and a middle-distance group around Bill.

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A Runner’s Journey

We raced every season, with fall and spring cross-country, indoor and outdoor track, and road races in between. In addition to the high school and university fixtures, there was a calendar of AAU races across Ontario, Quebec, and the northern USA. Hamilton was arguably the centre of the sport, with the national cross-country championships, major indoor and outdoor meets, and several storied road races, including Around the Bay, the Firestone 15, and the National Steel Car Junior two and a half miles. Guelph, Montreal, Windsor, Buffalo, London, Toronto, St. Catharines, and the Michigan universities also held celebrated events. Each had its own particular challenge and character. At the Thanksgiving Road Races in Guelph, the crowds and bands lining the one-mile lap around the downtown gave the afternoon a festive air, but the long rise on the back straight up Norfolk Street hobbled anyone who went out too fast. Cross-country races were held at the (then) Ontario Agricultural College and often you had to jump fences and dodge pigs and manure. By comparison, US cross-country was run on golf courses or flat lawns like Delaware Park in Buffalo. The outdoor season stretched from the middle of May to the end of August, with something every weekend, culminating on Labour Day at the Canadian National Exhibition. I loved the relay meets too, when track became a team sport. My favourite was the Silver Relay in Toronto’s High Park, organized and dominated by the Toronto Olympic Club. It was initially a ten-man, then a five-man relay, with each runner doing three laps around the Park’s main loop with the fall leaves in full colour. In some years, there were as many as 50 teams. As a sprint club aspiring to distance honours, the Silver Relay was EYTC’s “holy grail.” No matter how hard we tried or close we came, we never won that race. It was a different story at the two major relay championships on the track, the Canadians at Varsity Stadium in Toronto and the US at All High Stadium in Buffalo, where we battled teams from Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago and usually



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prevailed. I anchored the four-mile and distance medley relays. The mile relays were barnburners. If Bill got the baton within 20 yards of the leaders, there was no one he could not chase down. He would have run through an oak door if he had to. By 1962 I was averaging more than 40 races a year. Unlike today, when most races have been privatized, or organized as fund-raisers, these meets and races were run by clubs, with the entire schedule coordinated and regulated by the AAU. In the amateur era, no athlete, coach, or official was allowed to take money from the sport. Prizes were limited to cups and medals. We raised money for EYTC by selling tags in front of supermarkets and beer stores. We paid our own way, but entry fees were modest. The tracks were cinders or crushed brick, often loose or full of holes, and the jumpers had to land on shallow pits of sand or sawdust, a significant risk. That was what we knew. It was an exciting sport. I quickly showed that my previous season was not a fluke, winning high school, Ontario, and Canadian AAU cross-country championships in record times. My brother Ross joined the Malvern cross-country team and EYTC, and we won several team championships together. He would go on to star for McMaster in cross-country. Fred continued to push me towards the longer distances. In November 1959, on the Warren Valley Golf course in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, I won the US junior national AAU cross-country championship over six miles, the first time I had ever raced that distance. In the winter and spring, I continued to lower my times, establishing new records for the half (1:56.1), mile (4:17.2), and three miles (14:07.0). By the end of the season, I had broken 15 Canadian records and was named Canada’s top junior athlete in any sport. (I would go on to win this four times.) Other runners were improving too, but they couldn’t stay with me. I’ve often wondered whether I exemplified Malcolm ­Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. Gladwell, a U of T track alum from

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the 1980s, famously argued that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become exceptional. In my case, I was one of the first teenagers to train with such intensity, with most of the hours I put in comprising intervals at race pace, with a limited recovery. I had the advantage of training with older runners, on the best facilities available at the time, under the direction of a superb coach. I continually studied other runners, their body carriage, breathing, and styles of running, so that I could read and respond to every tactic or sign of weakness. I sought to “out-general” every field. I learned to throw mini-speed-ups into a race, lest a following runner get comfortable. I worked very hard to turn my long kicks into a weapon of surprise, initiating them when least expected and always with an explosive burst – never just an acceleration – to make it hard to counter. I tried to focus completely during races, blocking out any other thought or feeling. “If you hear the crowd,” I used to say to myself, echoing a quote attributed to Emile Zátopek, “you’re not concentrating.” I tried to manage my expenditure of energy prior to and during the early stages of a race so that, as much as possible, I could save everything for the final, all-out charge to the finish. Of course, sometimes a race necessitated very fast running early on, but I always tried to run within myself – “running as fast as I could without expending any energy” is the way I thought about it – until the final commitment. I visualized my races all the time. Getting stronger, surprising older runners, and repeatedly breaking records was a fantastic feeling. It was also a confidence builder to receive media attention and get to know other parts of Canada and the United States. My grades improved, too, no doubt because I had to use my time more economically. The focal point of the 1960 outdoor season was the Canadian Olympic Trials in Saskatoon in July, where berths to the Olympics in Rome were on the line. Three EYTC teammates – Ron Wallingford, Marion Munroe, and Stan Worsfold – had made it to



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the Pan Ams the previous summer and were peaking for Rome. Bill Crothers was running faster with every race. Ergas Leps and Doug Gilbert had set fast times while students at Michigan and Northwestern respectively. Hopes were high. Fred entered me in the 1500 and 5,000 and I used my paper route money to buy the air ticket. We were billeted in the Saskatoon School for the Deaf across from Griffith Stadium, along with the other competitors. It was the most competitive meet I’d ever attended, because all the top athletes from western Canada were entered, including Doug Kyle, who had represented Canada in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, and Vic Reeve, on scholarship at the University of Oregon, who had recorded the year’s fastest times in the mile. While I had raced in the previous year’s national championships in Montreal, that was much less competitive – the costs of travel preventing most westerners from attending. I still remember how nervous I was during the Opening Ceremonies. It was a reminder that I needed a good strategy to handle my emotions before a big race. Englishman Geoff Eales, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, won both my races. He was ineligible for the Canadian team but that didn’t slow him down. He beat me by a photo finish in the 5,000 with Kyle third. He beat Jim Irons of the Toronto Olympic Club and me by a good margin in the 1500. Kyle won the 10,000 and was named to the Olympic Team, along with Gord Dickson in the marathon. Neither Irons nor I made the team. The decision came as a disappointment but not as a surprise. Fred had said all along that my times were too far off the world list to warrant going to Rome, and that the Olympics were “no place for experience.” The selectors agreed. A master psychologist, Fred had always kept my performances in perspective. He would be full of praise after a big win and then pause and say something like “but Zimny in Poland set a new European Record last week and you still have a long way to go to catch him.”

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A Runner’s Journey

The star of the Trials was 19-year-old Harry Jerome from Vancouver. He won both the 100 and 200 in new Canadian records. In the 100, he was given a time of 10.0, equal to the world record set only three weeks previously by Armin Hary of Germany. I was sitting in the stands at the finish line beside Hal Brown, the U of T field events coach who was the Olympic coach that year. Hal clocked Harry at 9.9. Other timers that night caught Harry in 9.9, but the officials kept mum. I have always thought that they rounded it to 10.0 because they felt that no one would believe them if they gave him 9.9, but I later heard that officials did the same to Black runners in the American South. Fred gave us two weeks off when the Olympics opened in Rome and suggested that Orville and I go for a long walk as “active rest.” We decided to walk the marathon distance. On the morning of the 5,000 metres, we set out from Orville’s home near Leslie and Lawrence, heading north to Highway 401, east along the grassed median of the 401 to Port Union Road, and west along Kingston Road to my house in the Beach. If Orville had not been there as a witness and later ­written about it in a blog, no one would believe me today: the 401 is now a 12-lane traffic jam, the grassed median long gone. We got to the TV in just enough time to see New Zealander ­Murray ­Halberg win the 5,000 with a strategic burst three laps from the finish. I had always assumed I would go to university. It was an unspoken expectation. My father and his siblings had worked their way through university during the Depression. My mother was the first in her family to graduate and always said that the experience changed her life. While money was always tight, her older siblings helped her make it through, and she always spoke about their generosity. At Malvern, I was in the academic stream where the teachers continually spoke about the benefits of university and prepped us for the necessary exams. Track brought a new stress to my thinking about university. With the headlines I was getting and the records I broke, I became a



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target of recruiting for US universities. Ever since the late 19th century, universities and colleges from the elite Ivies and the land-grant publics to the small liberal arts colleges have offered outstanding athletes financial aid – tuition, books, accommodation, and meals – in exchange for their performances. Nothing like it was available in Canada until recently. “Athletic scholarships” provided access to the generally better facilities and professional coaching of US universities, often a more competitive calendar of races, and, in theory, free higher education. Some of Canada’s best Olympians and several of my EYTC teammates made it to the top of their sports on the basis of such “scholarships.” On the down side, depending upon the university and each athlete’s specific arrangement, they could constitute exploitative, full-time, underpaid athletic employment with little of the promised educational benefits. The intense collegiate competitive season burned out many athletes so that they had nothing left in the tank when the Canadian Olympic Trials came around. Then as now, the merits of the US athletic scholarship system were intensely debated. The different positions reflected not only different personal situations but different perspectives on Canada, the US, and strategies of social development. Some thought that “made-in-Canada” would always be inferior, others (like my United Empire Loyalist grandmother) countered that the US was a dysfunctional, hostile society. Still others felt that the best athletes should stay in Canada to provide a nucleus for Canadian sport development. The respected journalist Scott Young, in a Globe and Mail column entitled “Why Must They Leave Canada?”, argued that Canadian universities should provide comparable scholarships lest Canada lose “exceptional young athletes, [who] have the makings of good young citizens, worth saving.”1 During my Grade 13 year, I received many such offers. Some were written (I have more than a dozen such letters in my files), some coaches spoke to me at track meets, and others wooed me

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A Runner’s Journey

through intermediaries in Toronto. The distinguished U of T English professor Peter Buitenhuis invited me to lunch to pitch a scholarship at Yale. The Canadian financier Harry Jackman invited me to his Bay Street office to talk about Harvard. Some focused on the academic strengths of the particular university, but most talked primarily about the athletics. In an interview with Maclean’s, I observed that the typical letter from a US coach devoted the first two sentences to the educational opportunities and the next two pages to the athletic facilities.2 Some were courteous, like Don Canham of Michigan, Payton Jordon of Stanford, and Jim Bush of UCLA, but others rude and aggressive. When I mentioned to the Princeton recruiter that I was considering Harvard, he told me sexually explicit stories about “the immoral Kennedys” that made me blush, revelations that were not publicly confirmed until decades later. Some were completely puzzling. The Georgetown recruiter, an assistant prosecuting attorney in Ohio, sent me a copy of the letter he sent the Georgetown coach suggesting that “if he could not get me a job, how in the hell could he teach me to run.” It was an eye-opening experience. The only Canadian offers I received were from Professor Robert Osborne, head of physical education at the University of British Columbia, and Murray Ross, president of the recently established York University in Toronto. Ross told me that I could help put York on the map. I don’t think he knew that the Ontario rules prohibited athletic scholarships because he offered me “anything I wanted” to go to York. In the end, rather than spend every weekend on recruiting trips to the US, I decided to make my choice between what I deemed the best university in each country, U of T and Harvard. I knew from my years at Hart House that U of T could give me the challenging, comprehensive education I sought, and Fred and my teammates quietly pushed for U of T. But I wanted to make a real choice. So working through Mr. Jackman, I agreed to a Harvard weekend in early January 1961. On the Friday, I flew to New York,



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where several leaders of the Friends of Harvard Track gave me a tour of the Stock Exchange and lunch in a private dining room in the offices of ­Kidder Peabody. I had never seen such luxury. When the conversation turned to my interest in political science, one of the men in attendance asked me for my views about the Canadian prime minister, John Diefenbaker. I replied that while my family never supported Conservatives, I had some respect for ­Diefenbaker because he had recognized Castro’s Cuba. There was dead silence, until the man next to me put his arm around my shoulder in an avuncular manner and said quietly, “Bruce, as I look around the ­table, I estimate that we have collectively lost more than $10 million in Castro’s Cuba. I suggest we change the subject.” That evening, I flew to Boston, and the following morning wrote my SAT exams. In the afternoon, someone took me on a tour of the campus and, because I asked to talk to a professor, arranged a meeting with Rafael Demos, an elderly professor of philosophy. He immediately put me at my ease, discovered that I had read the works of Bertrand Russell, and, while engaging me in discussion about Russell, told me about the time he studied with Russell as a young man during the First World War, delivering pencils and paper to him when Russell was imprisoned for his pacifism. It was electrifying. If I had had to choose at that moment, I would have signed up for Harvard. That evening, as I will recount at greater length in the next chapter, I ran the two miles at the Knights of Columbus Indoor Meet at the Boston Garden, the first major meet of the season. During the next few months, I agonized over my choices, bombarded with advice. The Harvard offer was extremely generous, but eventually I decided to go to U of T. It was both a political and an athletic decision. Going to Harvard would have undermined my ambition to help rebuild Canadian sport and Canadian society, especially as I was increasingly held up in public as a representative of not just Malvern, East York, and Toronto but all of

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Canada. In this context, it was hard to stomach the US nationalism that emerged with the newly elected president John Kennedy, a Harvard grad. After I indicated my choice, one of the Harvard recruiters, the double Olympic gold medallist Tom Courtney, came to my house in Toronto in a last-ditch effort to turn me around. “With John F. Kennedy in the White House, and Harvard grads in every major agency and corporation, your Harvard degree will take you anywhere in the world,” he told me (and Bill Crothers, who was there at the time). “You will be one of the new Romans. Why would you want to stay in this little backwater [i.e., Canada] when you could have all that?” He was persuasive, but not in the way he intended. The other consideration was athletic. I liked the Harvard coach, Bill McCurdy, but all he talked about was the Harvard dual meet schedule. At one point he said, “With your strength, you could run four races every Saturday afternoon – the half, the mile, the two miles, and one of the relays.” I feared that by the end of the season, I’d be a wreck, and unable to compete on the international circuit. With Fred and the much shorter U of T season in Toronto, I could pick and choose my own races, and point to the big international races that increasingly I wanted to win. After I made my decision public, a reporter from the Ottawa Citizen asked my father why he had not intervened and pressured me to go to Harvard, the implication being that he had made a big mistake. “No,” Roby said. “That was not a mistake. After bringing up the boy to make his own decisions, it seemed a silly time to start laying down the parental iron hand.”3

4 CANADIAN HERO

While I was contemplating universities, Fred and I set our sights on the US indoor circuit, a January to April series of meets in major cities like Boston and New York. It would be a significant step up, because the fields were hand picked with top athletes from the US and around the world. Few Canadians were ever included. I had had a good autumn, winning the senior Canadian cross-country championship and recording breakthrough time trials, so Fred thought I was ready. But indoor track was almost a different sport. The events were held in cramped hockey and boxing arenas, so the running events took place around tightly banked wooden tracks, usually 160 yards in circumference, 11 laps to the mile. The Knights of Columbus in the Boston Garden was the first meet of the season. I only got there because of Harvard. I had wanted to run the two miles during my recruitment weekend but needed an invitation. Initially, the meet director, Clarence “Ding” Dussault, the track coach at Tufts, turned me down. He did not think I would be competitive. So I enlisted Harvard to make the request. Dussault then offered me a spot in the mile, arguing that, at 17, I was too young to run as far as two miles. I held out for the two. Only when Harvard insisted did he relent. I would have been even more nervous if Fred had not been there. In addition, four EYTC teammates – Bryan Emery, Bud

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Scott, Jim Snider, and Stan Worsfold – had driven all day from ­Toronto to see the race. While I napped and warmed up under the stands, I told myself that it was just another meet. The favourites were Peter McArdle, a 31-year-old Irish American, and Fred Norris, a 37-year-old British Olympian and world record holder who was attending McNeese State University in Louisiana on scholarship. Both of them had run under nine minutes, while my fastest time was 9:09. McArdle took the lead right from the gun, with Norris on his shoulder, covering the first mile in 4:24, much faster than I had ever run on the way to two miles. I just held on for dear life. Press reports said I had trouble negotiating the tight turns. By one and a half miles, though, I could feel the pace slightly slow down, and I passed Norris and moved up to McArdle’s shoulder. With four laps to go, Fred waved his hanky, the pre-arranged sign, and I sprinted as hard as I could into the lead, opening up about 20 yards. McArdle gradually pulled me back. With two laps to go, he was within five yards, chasing me so relentlessly I could almost hear him breathing down my neck. But I found a new spurt, held him off, and gradually lengthened my lead again. I won by eight yards in 8:49.2. It was a personal best and meet record and only three seconds off the then world record. (Murray Halberg would lower it by 12 seconds the following night in Portland.) Although I was too focused to notice, the crowd had been on its feet screaming for the last two laps of the race and remained standing when I jogged two laps afterwards. Walter Brown, the owner of the Boston Celtics, said that “it was the greatest ovation for a track man since the Garden was built in the 1920s.”1 Boston changed everything. In the next few days, I was swamped with invitations to run at other meets; requests to speak at public functions, service clubs, schools, and universities; and media attention from all over Canada and the United States. From that point on, as long as I continued to run well, I could pretty much



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invite myself, all (AAU-allowable) expenses paid, to any meet in the world. I no longer had to use my paper route money, drive or bus to meets, and stay in billets or the YMCA. That continued in Canada, but the US meet directors put us up in hotels. I immediately accepted invitations to Winnipeg, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. After I won the US indoor three-mile championship a few weeks later at Madison Square Garden in New York, I could also get expenses for Fred, and, with Fred as negotiator, for Bill Crothers. Once Bill had established himself as a star in his own right, Fred asked meet directors to invite other teammates, including a relay team. It paved the way for Canadian runners from other clubs. We always heard that meet directors were paying other headliners appearance fees and prize bonuses under the table. For us, having the chance to compete with the best and travel to and enjoy the big cities with our teammates was reward in itself. Breaking into that circuit gave me the opportunity to test myself against some of the very best distance runners in the world. I loved the excitement of those races, when just the adventure of racing took over and you and your competitors pushed each other to performances you had only imagined. While I had faced tough competition in my previous Canadian races, I usually won by large margins. After Boston, every race was a fight to the wire. In Los Angeles, I ran two miles against Jim Beatty of the Los ­Angeles Track Club and Max Truex of the US Air Force, both members of the US Olympic Team in Rome, previous world record holder Al Lawrence from Australia, and John Macy of ­Poland. Both Lawrence and Macy were on athletic scholarships at the University of Houston. I got lulled into a slow pace, only to have Beatty explode by me with two laps to go. That was sobering. I barely held off Truex for second. In the three miles in New York, I outran Lawrence, Macy, and Laszlo Tabori, a Hungarian world record holder who had defected

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to the US during the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne and competed for the Santa Clara Youth Village. In Chicago, I could only manage a distant second to Istvan Rozsavolgyi, another Hungarian world record holder, in a one mile. I didn’t have to pore over Track and Field News anymore to keep tabs on the best. I was racing against them. There was no time to coast. I had to learn to be much more tactically savvy. The indoor circuit brought me “up close and personal” to the other top athletes in the world. Although warming up was always complicated – usually we had to begin in the basement; sometimes outside – I always tried to get up to the track to see some of the featured events. During that first season, it was the Cold War-charged replays of the previous summer’s Olympic finals – between Valeriy Brumel of the USSR, the Olympic champion, and John Thomas of the US in the high jump; and Ralph Boston of the US, the Olympic champion, and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan of the USSR in the long jump. Their duels were electric and I could often sit or stand a few yards away. Given the hostile political rhetoric, I was struck by how gracious the US audiences were to the USSR champions. Another star I got to see first-hand was the Jamaican 400and 800-metre Olympic medallist George Kerr, one of the most beautiful runners I have ever seen, who was unbeatable at 600 yards. Gradually, I got to know them and many others, including coaches, meet directors, and reporters too. I quickly came to enjoy the indoor circuit. Unlike the almost cerebral atmosphere of outdoor track, there was carnival to these meets. Sandwiched in between the featured events were high school, college, and club relays, each of which brought their own cheering sections. An organist gave each runner a theme song – mine was usually “The Maple Leaf Forever” – and played the theme, at tempo, of whoever was in the lead at the time. The track abutted the stands and crowds could get pretty wild, sometimes openly wagering, sometimes splashing beer over the



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runners. The arenas were smoky (because there were few restrictions) and stank of liniment, beer, and popcorn. It was the only time I got sick after races. There was an elegant formality, too, with bunting, ceremony, and officials in starched shirts and tuxedos. In 1961, most meets were male only. Despite the abundance of female track stars from the US, it would be several years before any effort was made to include them. Boston catapulted me into the narratives of representation and Canadian nationalism. The calls, letters, and media profiles I received were all couched in the language of “running for Canada.” The Globe and Mail’s Jim Coleman wrote that “Bruce Kidd’s amazing performance in Boston should ignite the long-dead fires of interest in the track and field sports in Canada. [It was] one of the most pleasing occurrences in the history of Canadian athletics. [He] may prove to be such an interest to Canadian teenagers that the juke-box business may go out of business.”2 At a special ceremony at City Hall, Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips presented me with a beautiful silver tray “in recognition of the great honour brought to this City in winning International Middle Distance Running Championships.” He told the City Council that “Bruce Kidd is a symbol of Canadian manhood, good sportsmanship and scholarly excellence.”3 These statements drew upon and contributed to the new aspirations of Canadian nationalism that would characterize the 1960s. In a way we had courted this – before the Boston race, Fred had ordered a new set of EYTC shorts and placed a maple leaf prominently on the leg. My parents had nurtured me to take pride in Canada, too. I have learned from my own research that from its origins in 1866 the Canadian amateur movement was motivated by nation building and sent athletes into international competition to inspire Canadians in all walks of life. But in the winter of 1961, the cascade of support I received was overwhelming. I had trained and run for private goals – for

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myself, my coach, and my club, for the love of running and the ambition to be the best. In many ways, the “loneliness of the long distance runner” was very real. This was long before the creation of Sport Canada and the expectation that national team athletes would always compete in the national uniform. It was a very big step to equate what you did with the fortunes of the nation. I was honoured and humbled by the sentiment, but it took me a while to adjust to the fact that people who knew nothing about the details of my races congratulated and thanked me for winning for Canada. In many societies in human history, at least as far back as the Greeks of the classical world, communities have conferred “representational status” on athletes. In the modern period, the mass media, corporate sports teams, and governments have invested heavily in this identification. In 1961, the conditions were ripe for such symbolism. I won the race in Boston, still remembered by British loyalists like my grandmother as the city where the US traitors launched the American Revolution. The late 1950s had been a low point of Canadian performances in international competition. When the Canadian men’s hockey team, the most persistent symbol of Canadian nationalism, lost to the Americans at the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the Globe and Mail editorial cartoon depicted the statue of Sir Isaac Brock, the martyred hero of the War of 1812, weeping over the loss.4 Then at the Olympics in Rome, when Canadians came home with only one medal, the lowest tally since we first competed in 1900, the Globe and Mail called it a “national and international disgrace.”5 Pressure grew in Parliament for federal investment in amateur sports, and the Diefenbaker government promised “to consider means of encouraging the youth of Canada in amateur athletics” in the Speech from the Throne. There was a David and Goliath element to my story. I was young, competing against men older and more accomplished, and I had



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an awkward arm action that gave some observers the sense that I was a complete novice. It also helped that I lived in the media centre of English-speaking Canada. After Boston, the major dailies and the CBC assigned reporters and film crews to most of my races. Boston made me a symbol of youthful athleticism in the United States, too. Up until that point, few states allowed high school athletes to run further than one mile. While college performances in other events had improved significantly, times for the distance races had remained much the same for 40 years. The best distance runners in the US colleges came from other countries, lured by scholarships. After Boston, commentators suggested that it was time for a change. “Kidd starts a revolution in American track circles,” said one headline.6 Jim Simms, the secretary of the US AAU, told reporter Al Sokol that my performances as a teenager constituted “the most significant change in US track since the advent of spiked shoes. It compels us to re-examine our policies about distance running for school boys and you can expect a drastic change.” It would become a growing topic in the years ahead. That spring, in between high school meets, I ran twice more in California, where the major non-college outdoor meets were held in the United States every year. At the Mount San Antonio Relays in Walnut, on a track surrounded by avocado and orange trees, I  won the 5,000. Bill ran 46.2 on a one-turn 440 yards (i.e., the first 220 yards were run down a very long straightaway), one of the last times the event was set out that way, a huge breakthrough for him. If he had recorded that time in Canada, it would have been a new national record. It would not be until 1966 that Canadians could get credit for records set outside the country. Then in Los Angeles, I set a new US three-mile record of 13:26.6 on the way to a 5,000-metre win in the Compton Relays. We quickly learned why so many records were set in that state. Most tracks were made of clay, not the cinders to which we were accustomed. Watered

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every morning, the sun baked them into a smooth, forgiving, fast surface. These trips exacerbated my conflict with the Malvern principal, J. Leslie Kerr. Mr. Kerr was a stickler for rules, order, and a focus on marks. As early as Grade 10, I had run-ins with him over the dress code – he discouraged jeans and if you wore them with cuffs, he ordered you to fold them down. Once he sent me home for turning up on a hot day in Bermuda shorts. As student council president, I clashed with him over the “cram school” culture he created, pressuring teachers in the senior years to focus all their lessons on the Ontario-wide exams. He counselled senior football players whose marks fell after the fall season to drop courses and take Grade 13 in two years. I was convinced that they could easily catch up in the rest of the year. I argued that if the football team, theatre, or band helped them enjoy school more, their marks would improve. In Grade 13, I had to keep it a secret that I was studying history on my own lest he prohibit it. In those days, Grade 13 students wrote system-wide exams over two weeks in June. It seemed that all we did after Christmas was practise on the previous years’ exams. I felt we were ready in March, but still the pressure continued. When Mr. Kerr found out that, on the weekends before and in between my exams, I would be travelling out of town to run in track meets, he flipped. At first, he tried to talk me out of it. Then he called home and criticized my mother for allowing it. She simply cut him off and slammed down the phone. I had never seen her so angry. When the marks came out in August, it turned out that I did very well in those exams, no doubt relaxed and in high spirits from the weekends away from stress. I received firsts in all 11 subjects I attempted, including history, and became the school’s valedictorian. The newspapers had a field day. The Globe and Mail’s editorial cartoon depicted me in running gear, holding a diploma and a stack of books in one hand and a trophy in the other, a



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newspaper bag over my shoulder, while stomping with my spikes on the image of a rebellious male of the day. He had long hair and a black leather jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back.7 To Mr. Kerr’s credit, he acknowledged that “obviously his mother knew him better than I did.” My growing celebrity prompted filmmaker Don Owen at the National Film Board to make a film about me. The NFB’s mandate was to produce, distribute, and promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations. Don had worked on several films previously, but before he could earn a full-time position he had to direct a film entirely on his own. He wanted to meet that requirement by doing a profile on me. At first, I turned him down. So he appealed to my parents. They persuaded me to spend some time with Don and then decide. The occasion was a long weekend in Montreal when I was running in the Canadian championships in St. Lambert. After my race, I spent three days with Don, his partner Suzanne Gobeil, and their two children in the St. Denis quarter. It was my first introduction to the cultural energy of francophone Quebec, and to the emerging aspirations for a distinct Quebec society. The only “Quebec” I knew from track and field was Anglo and conservative. The “Quebec” I experienced that weekend was alive, colourful, and experimental. From Don, Suzanne, and their friends, I heard this heady aspiration to abolish the stultifying old structures, move away from the Catholic Church, and create a new society free from English Canadian domination. I imbibed a similar ambition to transform the old Canada when I visited the Film Board the next day. I wanted to be part of that change and agreed to do the film. The actual filming took place in Toronto in July. With the cameras rolling, I ran along the boardwalk in the Beach, trained at the track at East York, and raced against Laszlo Tabori and Max Truex in two two-mile races in Toronto. I won both races, setting a new

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Canadian record in one of them. Laszlo chased me right to the finish each time. I still get chills when I watch the resulting film, Runner. Don was a perfectionist, exhausting to work with, and manipulative in direction. In his feature films, he was not above giving contradictory instructions to the actors and camerapersons to create genuine drama. In my case, he sought to simulate the facial tensions of a race. He tied me to the bumper of the station wagon that he used as a trucking vehicle, telling me that we would run two laps. That’s what I did. But when we finished the two laps, he just kept driving. Since I was tied to the car, I had to run for my life. He got the shot he wanted. He recruited brilliant collaborators, including cameraman John Spotton, actor Don Francks, poet W.H. Auden, and composer Don Douglas. After a few difficult weeks, we became friends. Later that summer, the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) invited me to be the guest speaker at its Directors’ Luncheon for Young Canada Day. It was my first major public address. When we had public speaking in school, we had had to deliver from memory, but the CNE asked me to speak for much longer than I  had ever done previously. As much as I tried, I could not remember everything I had written without gaps and hesitations. At the luncheon prior to the speech, William Allen was sitting beside me. He was a controller at the City of Toronto who would become chairman of Metropolitan Council. He talked supportively, so at one point, I sheepishly asked him if I could read from the part of my speech I had not completely memorized. He laughed, touched my arm, and then said, “Of course, we all do it that way.” The speech was my first major attempt to insert myself into the debate about the future of Canadian sports. I began by demolishing four “myths” about Canadian sport and Canadian youth – “that the climate of Canada is too cold for developing athletes, that our coaches are no good, that young people in Canada are soft, and that people taking part in athletics are all muscle-bound



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morons, not concerned with studies or other important matters around them.” It is “never too cold” for physical activity, I said, but there is a case for better indoor facilities, so that our best athletes in the summer sports don’t have to go south to the United States to train. I affirmed the ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body and the vitality of Canadian youth, telling the audience: “Don’t weep for Canadian youth, but don’t try to do everything for youth. Let the younger generation do something for itself.” Then I turned to “our perennial poor showings internationally.” While I had benefited from the best public programs in Toronto playgrounds and schools, it was clear from what I had seen in the United States that Canada had fallen far behind in the provision of facilities, coaching, and much else. I said that we should do better for our own people. I argued that we should focus on developing our own opportunities and called for more cross-Canada competitions to stimulate excellence, instead of relying upon athletic scholarships in the United States. “There is a flow of athletic activity towards the United States that undermines unity among Canadian athletes. It is time to break down the isolation. There is a sentiment of nationalism in Canadian sports.” If we did that, I suggested, channelling my father’s ideas for a series of cultural investments building towards Centennial celebrations, we should point to 1967 and invite the world for competitions that summer. “We could be troublesome for Russia,” I concluded. The speech received coverage all across Canada. Four days later, speaking at the opening of the Hockey Hall of Fame at the CNE, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker promised an investment of $5 million to improve physical fitness and amateur sport, to be directed by a council composed of representative sports leaders. The following month, his government was true to his word, enacting the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act to pursue those goals. FAS and its successor legislation, the Physical Activity

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and Sport Act of 2003, have profoundly shaped the provision of sport and physical activity in Canada. That story will play a major role in this memoir. During the years ahead, I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Diefenbaker on several occasions. “Dief the Chief” could thunder in public, but in private I found him personable and reflective. In 1976, just before the Opening Ceremonies of the Montreal Olympics, I encountered him in an empty parking lot beneath the Olympic Stadium. He was all by himself, seemingly lost, so I offered to take him to his seat. “Is this your first Olympics, Mr. Diefenbaker?” I asked along the way. “No my boy,” he said. He stopped and looked me in the eye. “In 1936, I paid my own way to the unveiling of the Vimy Memorial in France, and because I loved amateur sports, continued on after the ceremony to watch the Olympics in Berlin. I sat eight rows above the Chancellor’s box, and for an entire week I had one eye on Herr Hitler and the other on track and field. I was very impressed with how the Germans had built up sport in their country and the spirit of confidence it gave the German people. I vowed to myself, if ever I had the chance I would do the same for Canada, under democratic auspices. That’s what I did in 1961.” In September, I entered the University of Toronto, enrolling in social and philosophical studies at University College. My original plans had been to attend Victoria College, which had offered me a scholarship. My mother loved her time at Vic, and most of my Malvern classmates were planning to go there. Yet in the last week of August, my uncle John (who worked at U of T as associate director of extension) took me out to lunch and urged me to change to UC. “If you go to Vic, it will be the same comfortable, white Protestant culture that you have known all your life,” he said. “UC is secular, the students are mostly Jews and the children of immigrants and it’s a hotbed of progressive politics. It will challenge you in cultural and intellectual ways.” I loved my uncle John and I was



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looking for a challenge, so I took his advice and paid my own way to UC. Later that year, when my parents moved to Ottawa, where my father had taken up the position of secretary treasurer of what became the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I moved into residence. It would be almost a year before I discovered what a bagel was, but UC became another lifelong home. That fall, I competed successfully in the Ontario universities outdoor track championships, setting new records in the one and three miles, and university and open cross-country. The season ended on American Thanksgiving when I won the US 10,000-­metre senior cross-country championship in the rain over a soggy course on the grounds of Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky. After trading the lead with several runners for most of the race, I  broke away down a hill with less than 800 metres to go, outkicking John Gutknecht of the Baltimore Athletic Club by 20  yards. John Macy was third, Ireland Sloan of Kansas fourth, and Peter McArdle fifth. Former Olympic 1500 champion Ron Delaney, running for the New York Athletic Club, was 33rd. In December 1961, I was honoured with the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s best athlete of the year and the Lionel Conacher Award as Canada’s Male Athlete of the Year, polling more votes than Montreal Canadiens’ 50-goal scorer Bernie Geoffrion and Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ Grey Cup star Bernie Faloney. Joe Taylor, a reporter for the Toronto Star, brought me the news in Hart House. I was elated and a little nervous. It was impossible to anticipate the lifetime of expectations and opportunities those honours would bring, but I knew my story would be forever changed.

5 COMMONWEALTH CHAMPION

My goal for 1962 was to win the three- and six-mile races at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, to be held in Perth, Australia, between November 22 and December 1. At the time, the BECG were second only to the Olympics in prestige and the quality of competition. Some of the very best athletes in the world came from Commonwealth countries, including Olympic champions Peter Snell (800 metres), Herb Elliott (1500 metres), and Murray Halberg (5,000 metres) in track and field and John Devitt (100 metres freestyle), Dawn Fraser (100 metres freestyle), ­Murray Rose (400 metres freestyle), and Anita Lonsbrough (200 metres breaststroke) in swimming. The Games held a special place for Canadians. A group of Hamilton sports leaders established them as the British Empire Games in 1930. Holding to that curious current of nationalism known as “Canadian imperialism,” which advocated an independent Canada within a powerful British Empire, they sought to strengthen ­sporting links between the imperial countries and colonies, while providing another international opportunity for Canadian athletes. The inaugural Games were so successful that sports leaders in other countries decided to continue them every four years. In 1954, the Games were held in Vancouver to great acclaim. The CBC televised them extensively.



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British ties were still strong in many parts of the country. After the creation of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1949 as an intergovernmental body to link the remnants of the British Empire on a “free and equal” basis, the Games were officially renamed the “British Empire and Commonwealth Games.” But most Canadians (including the media) still referred to them as the British Empire Games. To win in Perth, I would have to beat two outstanding defending champions, Halberg of New Zealand in the three miles and Dave Power of Australia in the six miles, along with several other accomplished runners. The 28-year-old Halberg was one of my heroes. He had tremendous experience, having competed previously in two Olympics and two British Empire and Commonwealth Games, tremendous speed, and tremendous stamina. He won races the same way I did – by surprising his opponents with a punishing kick a long way from home. In Rome, he opened up a huge lead with three laps remaining, and while he tied up over the last 200 metres, only winning by a few metres, he won. The photograph of him after the race, lying exhausted on the infield, the tape between his fingers and a big smile on his face, is one I will never forget. My indoor season started slowly. I had injured my plantar fascia in the US cross-country championship and it still bothered me at the beginning of January. Then I developed a toe infection that sidelined me for another week. All I could manage when I returned to competition was a succession of third places – at the Knights of Columbus (K of C) and Boston Athletic Association meets in Boston and the K of C meet in Cleveland. In each of those races I was leading with a lap to go, only to be overhauled in the final stretch. It was very discouraging. Then in early February, I lost badly to Halberg in a two-mile race in Los Angeles. It was a doubly difficult time, because my beloved uncle John died suddenly of a heart attack while curling at the age of 52. As often happened when I lost a race or my times levelled off, the media wondered, “Has Bruce Kidd burned himself out?” It was the

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counterpoint to running long distances as a teenager that would haunt me throughout my career. Mike Igloi, the accomplished Hungarian coach of the Los Angeles Track Club, told reporters that “I was running too quickly, too often, too young.” Doug Kyle, the Canadian Olympian, voiced the same concerns.1 When these stories cropped up, my parents and Fred talked on the phone, but decided that since I wasn’t demonstrating any ill effects, we should stay the course. As my father explained to the Ottawa Citizen that winter, “It was always a calculated risk when one ventured into the unknown but he was receiving good medical attention and with reasonable care, the risk was worth running. Being content with mediocrity would be a much greater risk!”2 In private, he scoffed at the concern. “What’s so hard?” he would say. “He runs around a track, sleeps in a warm bed, and eats nutritious meals every day. When his grandfather was at that age, he was clearing a section in Saskatchewan, living on pemmican, and wintering through −30 in a sod hut!” Then I bounced back, successfully defending my US indoor three-mile championship in New York and winning three other races convincingly in New York and Chicago. The concerns disappeared. Nevertheless, I was worried about my strength, so towards the end of the winter, I decided to add a morning run to my routine. As far as I remember, it was my own idea, enabled by living in the Sir Daniel Wilson Residence on the St. George campus and not having any travel time in the mornings. I began gingerly, jogging two miles two to three times a week. As the spring turned to summer, I gradually lengthened the distance to six to eight miles five days a week, and later included one or two morning interval workouts. It quickly had the intended effect. Fred had entered me in the Firestone 15, a showcase for the continent’s distance runners held every Good Friday over the streets of Hamilton’s industrial east end. (At the time, Hamilton’s other famous road race, Around the Bay, was held on Thanksgiving Weekend in the fall.) The favourites were my old rivals Fred



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Norris, Peter McArdle, and Doug Kyle. In his long, distinguished career, Norris had never been beaten over the distance. He was the previous year’s winner and held the course record. I had never previously raced anything longer than six miles. Norris and I traded the lead for 12 miles, but then he slowly fell back. I eventually won by 440 yards, lowering the course record by almost three minutes. Later that spring, Bill Crothers and I were invited to back-toback meets in California – the California Relays in Modesto and the Compton Relays in Los Angeles. Although we both had summer jobs – Bill in a pharmacy and I at radio station CFRB where I worked as a municipal reporter – we decided to take the week in between as a holiday. At Modesto, we hung out with sprinter Harry Jerome and shot putter Dave Steen, Vancouver athletes competing for the University of Oregon, both of whom became good friends. Harry was the most beautiful runner I ever saw. He had a gentle wit, but as a Black athlete, he always started with two strikes against him. Once he teased a favourite history professor who tended to go on, “Sir, the South could use you in its filibuster against the civil rights bill,” and was thrown out of the class. He was generous to his friends, wise about sports, but we had endless debates about politics. Even though he was always poor, he hated socialism. We had lots of fun together. I won the two-mile race from Vic Reeve, another Canadian attending the University of Oregon, in a new Canadian best time of 8:41.9. Harry had tremendous results, out leaning top US sprinter Bob Hayes in an eye-catching 9.3 for 100 yards and anchoring Oregon’s 4 × 110-yard relay team to a world record equalling 40.0 seconds. Steen set a new Canadian best for the shot put. We felt on top of the world. Then Bill and I took a bus to LA. Bill had just lost a tooth and slept, but I marvelled at the massive, irrigated fruit and vegetable farms along the way. A few days later, I arrived at the training track at Occidental College to find Halberg giving a talk to the assembled runners

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and coaches. I quietly stood at the back, even asking him a few questions. Although we had raced against each other just a few months earlier, I don’t think he recognized me. He told everyone that on Saturday night he was going to make an attempt to lower the world records (his own standard of 13:10 for three miles, and Kuts’s 13:35.0 for 5,000 metres) because he thought they were soft. The 5,000 metres is just 188 yards longer than three miles, and at Compton, the organizers had official timers at both distances. Halberg said he hoped to run even splits and then finish strongly. I’m sure he felt he had nothing to fear by revealing his strategy; no one had come close to him in years, especially in the United States. He also offered one piece of psychological advice that I’ve never forgotten: sometimes it’s necessary to lead from the front in order to ensure a required pace, but you should never commit yourself to the lead until you’re ready to race for home. Up until that point, if someone takes over, it should not be a worry, and you can even regard it as help. But after the point where you decide to take the lead for good, you must fight off every challenge. The evening was cool and windless, perfect conditions. Halberg set off as promised, and each of his early splits was faster than anything I had ever run before. By the end of the first mile, only Max Truex and I were still in contention, and that’s how we ran, lap after lap. By two miles, Halberg had fallen off world record pace but was still running significantly faster than anything I had ever done. With half a mile to go, Truex dropped back slightly, and I moved up to Halberg’s shoulder. Halberg then moved into the second lane and urged me to take over the lead. Not wanting to give him the chance to recuperate and come back at me on the final lap, I shook my head, and simply waited, until there was 660 yards remaining, when I took off as fast as I could to win the race. The times were new American records, 13:17.4 for three miles and 13:43.8 for 5,000 metres, both world junior records.



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(The 5,000-metre mark subsequently became the Canadian junior record. It lasted 54 years, until Justyn Knight broke it in 2016.) Truex was second and Halberg faded to third. It was the first time he had been beaten in six years. There would be a rematch over three miles three weeks later at the US championships at Walnut, California. It would be my second race in as many days. The night before the three miles, I ran the six miles against a field that included Peter McArdle, John Gutknecht, and Doug Kyle. I had raced several times in a single afternoon and two days in a row before, so I was fairly confident I could do well, but I had never doubled at such distances. I wanted to win both in Perth so I was determined to try. I ran well in the six miles, setting a new American record, but McArdle and Gutknecht pushed me to my limit. The following afternoon, when Max Truex, Pat Clohessy, an Australian at the University of Houston, and Halberg broke away from the pack with three laps remaining, I could not keep up. Halberg had no trouble sprinting away from the leaders in the final lap, and although I caught ­Clohessy, I had to settle for third place. After the race, Halberg said that “after losing at Compton to Kidd, I changed my strategy. From now on I run against opponents, not against time.” He also said that “you can’t come back the next day in the three mile after running the six miles. If Kidd had been fresh, it would have been a different story.”3 He’s just trying to psych me out, I thought. But he was not the only one who suggested that I should concentrate on one event. The difficulty of choosing became apparent again the following month in London, England, when I faced the best of the British runners over three miles in the English championships at White City Stadium, the site of the 1908 Olympics. It was my first time in London and I spent the two days before the race visiting Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Canada House. In the race itself, there was continuous jockeying for the lead by the top British

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runners Derek Ibbotson, Bruce Tulloh, and Martin Hyman. By comparison, North American races were orderly! With two laps to go, I went to the front with only Tulloh staying with me. We continued to trade the lead right until the final straightaway when he pulled away to win. It was disappointing, but my second-place time of 13:17.0 was a new Canadian best. Clearly my Compton time was not a fluke and I could be a contender in the three miles. One week later at the Police Games in Toronto, I outsprinted Bill Dotson of Kansas University in a mile race in 4:01.4, smashing my PB and the Canadian record that Rich Ferguson had set in the Miracle Mile in 1954, suggesting to some that I should enter the mile in Perth as well. To keep my options open, I decided to qualify in both the six and the three miles at the Canadian Trials in August, to be held at East York in Toronto. It would be a Saturday-Monday double, with two days’ rest between races, the same as in the BECG program in Perth. My goal in the six miles was to break 28 minutes, which would have brought me closer to the best British, Australian, and New Zealand runners, most of whom had run under 28. The Commonwealth record was 27:49.8, set a few weeks earlier at the British championships by Roy Fowler. I kept on pace for almost five miles, but it was hot and humid, and I was entirely on my own – I lapped the entire field, including Doug Kyle – and I lost concentration for a few laps. I finished in 28:09.6, a new Canadian record, but I was completely gutted. The following Monday, I won the three miles easily, but in a slow time, so the questions about the double continued. The trip to Perth was a major expedition. The Toronto contingent (including Fred as team coach and EYTC teammates Bill Crothers and George Shepherd) flew to Vancouver on November 8, where the entire Canadian team of 72 athletes and 19 officials in nine sports was assembled. (Although there were parasport medal competitions in five sports at the Games, no Canadians



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took part.) There were no Fitness and Amateur Sport funds yet available, so all of our expenses were paid by private donations. Fortunately, no athletes had to contribute, a common practice for earlier international teams. Our chartered plane was a turboprop, with limited speed and fuel capacity, so we made our journey in stages, first to Hawaii, where we spent a day, then to Fiji and Brisbane, where we stopped for two days, then over to Perth, arriving on November 13, nine full days before the Opening Ceremonies. The total flying time from Vancouver was 36 hours. The organizing committee had constructed new athletic facilities and a new suburban subdivision for the Commonwealth Games Village – a viable model when population expansion necessitated new housing. Just before we arrived, 8,000 volunteers had cleaned up and beautified the city. It was warm and sunny. It was a perfect setting for a multi-sport games, but I thought we had left the world behind. Just weeks before, US president John Kennedy’s announcement that Soviet nuclear missiles had been discovered in Cuba – what became known as the Cuban missile crisis – had terrified my friends and me at U of T, along with the rest of the world. I still remember the special issue that the campus newspaper, the Varsity, where I had begun to work, published on the night of Kennedy’s announcement. While Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a stand-down (the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the removal of similar US missiles from Turkey), there was still considerable uncertainty when we left Vancouver. When we arrived in Perth, there was little international news – the Western Australian tabloids were preoccupied with local politics and sports. I had seen the film On the Beach, based on Neville Shute’s novel about the destruction of human societies by nuclear explosions. The plot focuses on what happens in Australia as the radioactive cloud begins to drift south. I feared that even if nuclear war broke out, we would never know about it in Perth.

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In the week before the Opening Ceremonies, as we acclimatized to the time zone and the heat, I got to know the city, attended several arts performances and exhibitions, and tried to keep abreast of my studies. While our teammates on US scholarships took the semester off, the three of us enrolled in Canada – Bill and I at U of T and swimmer Sara Barber at McMaster – took bags of books. I was studying Commonwealth governments that term, and through Professor Elizabeth Wallace, spent a day at the state legislature and wrote an assignment on Australian federalism. An opposition MLA drove me home. There were also discussions in the dining hall about the politics of the Commonwealth. It was the first British Empire and Commonwealth Games from which white South African athletes were excluded because of apartheid. South Africa’s membership in the Commonwealth had been rejected the previous year at the initiative of African and Asian political leaders, supported by Canadian prime minister Diefenbaker. India was also absent, because most of the top Indian athletes were in the armed forces, called to the Himalayan border because of Sino-Indian conflict. It was a disturbing introduction to the way in which sport was affected by the larger political issues of the day. I had my first beer in Perth. On a very hot afternoon, I was at the home of one of my father’s adult education colleagues at the University of Western Australia. As I wrote my parents, “For dinner, they offered western Australian beer (Swan Lager) and I almost declined until I saw their nine-year-old boy helping himself.” After that, Harry and I found a way to steal beers from the fridge in the officials’ bungalow. When my events were over, I joined Neil Allen, the athletics correspondent of The Times, and his brother, who lived in Perth, on a vineyard tour. It was my first taste of wine as well. It was a far cry from the Women’s Christian Temperance Society hotel where we had stayed in Brisbane, where they inspected every bag for alcohol at the door.



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While we trained and hung out in the athletes’ village, we warily scouted out our opposition. Long before the internet and worldwide film and television, it was difficult to know what to expect. As Neil Allen wrote in the build-up to the Games, “the strangeness [is] just not knowing who your chief rivals are and how they are performing. These days there is better documentation of the sport but still the Commonwealth Games present an unknown challenge to many competitors.”4 I was fortunate that I had faced Halberg in the US and saw all the top British runners at the British championships, but I still had questions. I did my own research using the international newspapers in the U of T Library and corresponded with the Australian runners I knew in the US. My most insightful informant turned out to be Allan Lawrence, the Australian Olympian at the University of Houston. He handicapped all the runners he thought would challenge for the medals, focusing on Halberg and Dave Power. He warned me exactly where Power would likely try to break me and even included an analysis of Power’s split times at the Australian championships to make the case. When I mentioned this at a reunion of the Australian distance running community during the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, at which both Lawrence and Power were present, shouts of angry betrayal were hurled at Lawrence. Not trusting my memory, I backed off and apologized to both of them. But when I dug into my files in researching this memoir, I found Al’s letter and the breakdown of the splits, every bit as informative as I remembered. There were no Africans among the favourites. While future Olympic champion Kip Keino of Kenya ran the three miles, the African running revolution was still a few years away. As we lined up for the start of the six-mile race on Saturday after­ noon, November 24, I felt confident. My preparation had gone as well as I could have expected. I was psychologically prepared for the jostling of British runners in a pack, the New Zealanders’

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team tactics, and the possibility that Dave Power would throw in several fast laps in the late stages of the race. It was an extremely hot day, the hottest in 49 years, and it had only cooled off to 84°F by the time the race started in the late afternoon. But I had been taking cold showers all afternoon and felt comfortable. The race itself unfolded according to plan. Several runners shared the lead until about six laps to go, when Power took off just as expected. I was the only one who went after him, and those two laps felt like the hardest I had ever run in my life. Then he started to slow down, and with three laps to go, I did the same to him, and that was the race. I won by about 50 yards in a new Games record of 28:26.6. John Merriman of Wales was third. It was an extremely gratifying victory, and the first medal for Canada at the Games. Later that night, swimmer Dick Pound won gold in the 100-yard freestyle. After only two days of competition, Canada had doubled our gold medal tally from Cardiff just four years previously. The only upsetting note was that Harry Jerome tore his quadriceps in the 100-yard final. It was horrible. The tear in his leg was so large you could put your hand in it, yet he was savaged as a “quitter” in the media, another instance of the racism he faced his entire life. He was rushed home to Vancouver for corrective surgery. I got as much rest as I could before the three miles and taped up the extensive blisters on my feet. Despite all the fast runners in the race, I felt it was a two-man race, Kidd v Halberg. My tactic was to stay behind Halberg until the later stages of the race, so that I could surprise him with a kick. Unfortunately, he had the same idea about me. It was another hot day, no one was willing to set a fast pace, and lap after lap, as the entire field bunched up, ­Halberg and I played a cat-and-mouse game with each other. I would go to the front and he would stay on my shoulder. I would drift to the back of the pack, and he would slow with me. Whenever I thought I had got away from him, he touched or bumped



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me, just to remind me that he was there. Finally, with two laps to go, I made a run for it. While I stretched out the field, I could not break contact with Halberg. With not much more than a lap to go, he reached out and brushed me with his arm again. I simply froze, and the rest of the field closed in, just like an accordion. That’s how we entered the final lap and ran the penultimate bend, just crawling along. Then Halberg took off, with a blaze of speed, and won easily. He covered the last lap in a remarkable 53 seconds. Four runners flew by me – Ron Clarke, Derek Ibbotson, Bruce Tulloh, and Pat Clohessy – and I gave chase. I caught all of them but Clarke, so I took the bronze medal. After losing to Tulloh at the White City, it was gratifying to catch him down the straight. After the race, Halberg said he knew he would win when he learned that I would run both races. “He was crazy to attempt those two races in 48 hours,” he told the media. “It was sheer suicide. It was alright for men like Zátopek and Kuts who were experienced and canny but not for a boy.”5 Years later, I took Sir Murray (as he became after the Queen ­ appointed him Knight Bachelor in 1988) for a day of sightseeing at Niagara Falls. We spent the entire 90-minute drive back to Toronto discussing that race. I was amazed by how well prepared he was to counter my every move. I still think I did the right thing attempting both races, but I’m not sure there was much else I could have done to win that day. Three days later, I attempted the marathon, a decision I would love to have again. Somehow the example of Zátopek at the 1952 Olympics was much in my mind, and it seemed a waste not to try another race. The choices were the mile or the marathon. With world record holder Peter Snell so heavily favoured in the mile, I thought I might have a better chance to win another gold medal in the marathon. Fred, although opposed, agreed to let me run. In retrospect, I can’t believe my naïve arrogance. I had never run a marathon, let alone trained for one – although I ran

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every morning with Canadian marathoner Gord Dickson, a fount of wisdom and experience. I had no understanding of the requirements for hydration and feeding along the way, even at the primitive state of such knowledge at the time. I just thought it would be a very long run with a sprint at the finish. I did feel great for the first 18 miles, running in a bunch with the leaders, and when Mel Batty, Brian Kilby, Dave Power, and John Merriman made a break for it at 16 miles, stayed on their heels. But at 20 miles, I ran out of gas, and lost ground. At 22 miles, in fourth place, Fred pulled up beside me in a car. According to the reporter who was with him, I said that “I could certainly finish but I can’t catch the leaders.” Fred then told me to get into the car and I quickly obliged. Curiously enough, once John Merriman, who was 50 yards ahead, saw me get into the car, he stopped, turned around, and got in beside me. We made it back in time to see Brian Kilby romp home, with Dave Power coming in second. To this day, I’ve wondered what would have happened if I had run the mile instead. Or if I had stayed in the marathon, whether I would have bounced back with a “second wind.” Every runner has those “might have beens.” After a joyous Closing Ceremonies, we returned to Toronto on another turboprop flight that took 48 hours, 42 hours of which were in the air. I thought I would be wrecked for a month, but just a few weeks later, I ran 4:04 for a mile in the new indoor facility at Syracuse University. On New Year’s Eve, Bill Crothers and I celebrated on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, after I won the three-mile race and Bill beat US star Tom O’Hara in the mile in the Sugar Bowl Track Meet that afternoon. Despite the slow start, it had been a gratifying year. I had run 48 races, winning all but six of them, and in addition to my Commonwealth championship, I set Canadian and world under-20 records in four events. For the second time in a row, Canadian Press voted me Canada’s Male Athlete of the Year.

6 A CHEER FOR AMATEURISM

Whenever I attended an athletic banquet or fund-raiser with any of the Toronto Maple Leafs, it was not very long before the conversation turned to amateurism. The Leafs of the 1960s were gifted, scrappy athletes. Between 1962 and 1967 they won four Stanley Cups. Several of them had an eye for the financial side of the game. Carl Brewer and Bob Baun were part of the group that worked with Alan Eagleson to form the NHL Players’ Association. Years later, Brewer initiated the successful lawsuit by the players to win fairer pensions from the NHL and wrest control of their pension funds from the corrupt Eagleson. Bob Pulford would go on to become general manager with Chicago. I had watched them play as juniors for the Toronto Marlies and St. Mike’s. Like most other people in Toronto, I closely followed their games and careers in the NHL. They watched us race in the US. Brewer and I shared connections from the east end of Toronto. Most of these encounters were friendly, but sometimes one of them, usually Bob Pulford, would call me a dupe for running as an amateur. You’re drawing all those crowds and the tickets aren’t free, so why aren’t you getting any money, they would ask. I would respond by saying that under amateurism, I could run my own races, lead my own life, and get the education I wanted. I didn’t need the money to run. If the discussion became heated, I called

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them athletic peons, even children, brutalized by the mindless, authoritarian culture created by the Leafs’ founder, general manager, and majority owner Conn Smythe and his well-known opposition to the players’ education. Smythe tried to control every aspect of their lives. He sent players who married without permission to the minors. He bitterly fought the creation of the players’ union, trading and demoting those who contributed to its organization. Despite his own university degree, he once told Scott Young that he would never hire a player who had more than a Grade 12 education. I knew that several players were secretly taking summer courses at McMaster University, and although they were grown men in their 20s, they were terrified that Smythe and his coach, another martinet, George “Punch” Imlach, would find out. They were the ones being ripped off, I said. It was a standoff. I have always felt privileged to run track during the last days of Canadian amateurism. In an individual, relatively inexpensive sport, supported by public educational institutions, the amateur ideal worked for me and the men and few women of my class. We were enabled to think about sports as a rich form of education about self and society. Within my milieu, in the East York Track Club and at the University of Toronto, sport was preparation for a subsequent career in something else – through the development of work discipline, effective interpersonal relations, and influential social networks. It was not intended to be a livelihood. Most of my teammates went on to forge successful careers in the professions. Bill Crothers became a pharmacist and businessman. He planned to retire early and devote the last half of his life to volunteer community service. That’s exactly what he did, first as chair of the York Region Children’s Aid Society then as chair of the York Region School Board. At the Board, he inspired a school that enables students to learn to play and study sports in a well-equipped public institution, regardless of their previous athletic experience or family income. Most institutions called “sports



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schools” are academically supportive homes for already accomplished athletes who have the means to train in private programs. The Bill Crothers Secondary School gives students opportunity within the free public system. It draws students and praise from all over the world. Dave Bailey became a professor of clinical pharmacy, with many telling research discoveries. Brad Hill became a professor of management and a volunteer coach, David Whitson a professor of political science, Abby Hoffman a senior civil servant in sport and health and a respected official at international competitions. There are countless such stories. It would be at least another generation and the transformation of player salaries before middle-class families and institutions in Canada encouraged sport as a career. I grew up in the YMCA, long a major contributor to Canadian amateur sport, and then embraced the ideals of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the most familiar version of modern Olympics. Both traditions regard the athlete as a self-actualizing individual – not a subordinated athletic worker. I certainly saw myself in that mould. Although I rarely questioned Fred’s guidance on training and the meets I ran, as I grew older and more experienced, I contributed to the decisions and, on occasion, insisted upon a different course. I took the courses I wanted at university and no one told me otherwise. I got plenty of support for this approach from my professors and mentors at U of T. The university (and Toronto) had long been a bastion of Canadian amateurism, and my ambition to combine high-performance sport with other interests was taken for granted, even encouraged. Three of my political economy teachers – H.I. Macdonald, Tim Reid, and Peter Russell – had been Rhodes Scholars who excelled at sports, in track, football, and hockey respectively. They would go on to make transformative contributions to scholarship, public policy, and higher education.

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H.I. was dean of men at University College, living in the apartment on campus later named Bissell House. Early in my first year, when the speed-up of university assignments gave me a moment of doubt, I asked him whether I could excel in both academics and athletics. “You’ll never know unless you try,” he said. Joseph McCulley, the warden of Hart House, was another mentor. He was always recommending plays and artistic exhibitions to see in the cities we visited. As much as possible, I tried to combine one cultural activity with every trip. Some professors suggested research ideas in connection with my travels. In Gordon Skilling’s course on contemporary European politics, I signed up for an essay on the power struggles within the Soviet system. When he learned that I was running in the British indoor championships in London, he put me in touch with a colleague who had just returned from a tour of the eastern European capitals. His friend took me out to lunch to share his findings. I wrote most of my essay on the plane home. Of course, the lack of a salary for track forced us to be otherwise occupied. Amateurism kept a damper on the amount of training you could do. It also permitted the well-rounded life. I once disclosed that I was training twice a day at a dinner with British runners, including Martin Hyman (whom I admired because of his engagement in the nuclear disarmament movement), Bruce Tulloh, and Chris Brasher, the Olympic steeplechase champion turned journalist. They were very cross with me. It was not that it would make me more competitive, they said, but because it threatened the rich possibilities of amateur sport. “If you run twice a day and everyone does the same,” Martin said, “then someone else will train three times a day and then four times a day. We’ll all have to become full-time athletes. The life we currently lead will be impossible.” Tulloh once told a British journalist: “I do not agree with the frequently accepted view that the top-class athlete must be dedicated in the sense that his whole life should be directed towards the



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athletic goal. For an athlete, as for any normal person, the most important thing should be his relationship with and contribution to his family, his friends and the wider community around him.”1 I pooh-poohed their fears about two workouts a day, but they were prophetic, if not well behind the conditions elsewhere in the world. Certainly in the Soviet Union and in the US military, some runners were already training full-time. Years later, Murray Halberg told me that for all intents and purposes he was a full-time runner during the height of his career. I retain an admiration for amateurism. The early leaders of amateur sport in Canada, men like George Beers, Norton Crow, James Merrick, and W.A. Hewitt and women like Alexandrine Gibb and Mabel Ray, were genuinely committed to nation building and ­social development through sport – what my colleague ­Peter ­Donnelly calls “sport for good.” They inspired generations of selfless volunteerism in the interest of fair sport and youth ­development, and they brought the state into the provision of opportunities through municipal recreation and provincial and federal programs. The amateur sport leaders of my youth, men like Fred and women like Margaret Lord of the Hamilton Olympic Club, provided life-enhancing experiences for thousands of youth, despite the difficulties they faced. But I can now understand why working-class athletes and those from the rural areas and the resource hinterlands turned professional. In a society of significant inequality, where higher education was limited to a small fraction of the population – in 1961, only 10 per cent of my age cohort attended university – few other career opportunities existed. Professional sports offered not only the allure and excitement of the “big leagues” but also the possibility of an escape from the drudgery and hard times of physical labour. I can also now understand why amateurism became so unpopular. The ideal of selfless play was a carryover from the British

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upper-class prejudice against working-class athletes. As market relations spread into ever more aspects of life and “pay for play” became a growing practice, it became impossible to hold back the tide. In team sports such as hockey and baseball, where bragging rights and gate receipts could be affected by star players and a winning team, the incentives for team managers to circumvent the rules were huge. By the time I signed my first amateur card in 1958, the rules had been liberalized, but they were still very strict. In the seven sports governed by the AAU, every athlete had to attest that they had never Participated for money or prizes that exceeded $50 in value; Capitalized in any way on their athletic fame or success, or s­ ecured employment or promotion by reason of their sports performances rather than their ability; Been paid for teaching or coaching others in sport; Received a scholarship mainly for their athletic ability; Neglected their usual vocation or employment for competitive sport whether at home or abroad. If an athlete is paid for the use of his name or picture or radio or television appearance it is capitalization of athletic fame as depicted above. Even if no payment is made, such practices are to be deplored, since in the minds of many, particularly the young, they undermine the exalted position held by amateur champions.2

How strange that language reads today. The rules restricted the number of days you could travel outside your home region and the expenses you could take. They prohibited “broken time payments” – payments to compensate athletes for the salaries that they lost if they travelled during work time. It was a double whammy, because if working athletes travelled too



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much for sports, they lost income, and sometimes even their jobs. In 1964, two prominent Toronto athletes, my teammate Stan Worsfold and the Don Mills hurdler Jennifer Wingerson, were fired when they asked for time off for an international competition. I respected the rules, but what I came to question was the discretion they gave decision makers. If an official wanted to punish someone, they could usually do so by summary conviction. I gradually learned to help teammates who faced disciplinary action, notably Hylke van der Wal, who loved to boast about breaking the rules. It was an early baptism in the struggle for athletes’ rights. I got in trouble myself on at least two occasions. In 1960, before the ceremony where I would receive the Viscount Alexander Trophy for Canada’s top junior athlete, the former Olympic champion, journalist, and AAU official Bobbie Rosenfeld called my mother to ask what might be a suitable gift. “He’d love a portable typewriter,” my mother said, thinking that Rosenfeld, a writer herself, would well understand. But Bobbie cried foul – it would cost more than the rules allowed. She told Fred that my mother had jeopardized my amateur status. While my parents usually insisted that we earn the money to buy things like that for ourselves, they promptly bought me a portable typewriter and kept the receipt. Their view was that if I wanted to change the rules, I would be in a much stronger position to do so if I had abided by them myself. In 1965, while I was recovering from ankle surgery, Ottawa radio station CFRA paid me to broadcast an international track meet at Varsity Stadium. The Toronto media loudly complained that I had broken the rules, specifically the requirement that anyone who writes, lectures or broadcasts for payment upon any track and field event or competition [must obtain] the prior permission of his national governing body. This permission must be only given in the case of a person who is genuinely making his main career in one or other of these activities.3

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The central Ontario AAU called a special meeting to investigate. Although I was not allowed to attend, I was able to submit correspondence that showed that I had had kept the AAU track and field committee in the loop about my writing for the Varsity and my summer and part-time employment as a journalist for CFRB and the Star. It had given me permission to write professionally, although nothing had been said about sports. In the end, no disciplinary action was taken. But it forced me to apply on a meet-by-meet basis for permission to broadcast or write about sports. The debate over amateurism would only intensify in the years ahead, until the IOC completely abolished it in 1983. As I pointed out to the Leafs, amateurism allowed me to speak my own mind. Early in 1963, I was eager to say something critical about sports and the largely uncritical coverage of professional sports in the media. I was gradually learning from my teammate Doug Gilbert, who became a sports reporter in Winnipeg, Chicago, and Montreal, and Paul Rimstead, who wrote for the Star and Globe and Mail, that teams like the Leafs wined, dined, and made generous gifts to reporters to ensure positive stories. I still remember Doug telling me that when he first covered the Canadiens for the Montreal Gazette the reporters were expected to fly on the team plane and line up with the players for meal money. In the CFRB newsroom, where I worked during the summer and on Sundays during the school year, Ron McAllister filled my ear with stories about how sports writers bent over backward to make the teams and their favoured athletes look good. The rule of thumb was to exaggerate four times, Ron would say, with lots of made-up quotes to clean up the players’ language. He boasted about having written an entire book about Marilyn Bell, the 16-year-old swimmer who first swam across Lake Ontario (Swim to Glory: The Story of Marilyn Bell and the Lakeshore Swimming Club) without having talked to Bell until the book was in galleys. My



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colleagues on the Varsity were also critical of the leading sportswriters for pulling their punches. The issue that provoked me into controversy was the inauguration of an indoor track meet at Maple Leaf Gardens sponsored by the Toronto Telegram (“Tely”) in late January 1963. On the one hand, it was a terrific opportunity – we had always wanted to race against the best before a hometown crowd. On the other hand, it was promoted in a heavy-handed fashion by Maple Leaf Gardens and the Tely around me as the star attraction. After it was announced, I was at a Leafs game and encountered Harold Ballard, the Leafs’ executive vice president. Instead of asking, Ballard ordered me to run. When I politely replied that Fred and I were considering it but it had to fit into our long-term plans, he lifted me up against a wall and told me I had no choice. On the day before I went home to Ottawa for Christmas, I received a call from Jim Webb of the Telegram, with whom I worked at CFRB. At the time, the Tely had an arrangement with the radio station to the effect that it would provide scoops in exchange for acknowledgment (“According to a story in the Toronto Telegram today …”). If I was the person on the news desk, those calls would come to me. “Congratulations,” Jim said. “You have been chosen as the Telegram’s Citizen of the Year.” The previous year it had gone to Prime Minister Diefenbaker. Imagine my shock when I returned to Toronto in early January to see that the Tely had begun to print ballots for the award, along with the suggestion that I was a strong candidate. Surprise, surprise. I won. I went to see publisher John Bassett to protest. He said I would still get the award, I was just being too modest. So in an interview about the award, I said it should go to René Lévesque, who as minister of natural resources in the Quebec government of Jean Lesage had just nationalized the private hydro-electric companies. I admired Lévesque, and hoped that my endorsement would rile the private-enterprise Tely, but it printed my comments anyway.

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At the same time, day after day, the newspaper ran long stories about me to promote the meet, including a front-page analysis of my physiology and psychology by Don Mills coach Lloyd Percival. I felt that I was a victim of the hyperbolic exaggeration McAllister had told me about. At the meet itself, I won the three miles in a new Canadian record, lapping everyone else in the field, including two invited British runners, was voted athlete of the meet, and received the Telegram’s Citizen of the Year award. But I was so upset that I was rude and ungracious. I told someone that “I would wrap up the Tely’s award in toilet paper and throw it down the basement.” A few days later, I spoke at the Conn Smythe Sports Celebrities Dinner, conducted by the Ontario Sportswriters and Broadcasters at the Royal York Hotel in support of the Society for Crippled Children (now Easter Seals), with the chip still on my shoulder. As the recipient of Ontario’s 1962 athlete of the year, I was seated in the centre of the head table and given more time to speak. I tried to set out the benefits of track and field in comparison to other sports. At a previous banquet, I heard Annis Stukus, the well-known Canadian football star and coach, extol the benefits of football. I felt it was a formula I could adopt. I talked about what I liked about track and field – the variety of running, throwing, and jumping, the fact that every event is timed or measured, so that anyone in the world can compare performances; the fact that the results aren’t complicated by constant rule changes and the interpretations of referees, and that individual athletes stand or fall on their own ability. If I had stopped there, I might have been fine. But I went on to compare the strengths of track to the qualities of team sports. At one point I said, “Nobody knows for certain how good a football team is in any game because the team may be playing poorly or may be fired up and playing over their heads. In track we always know superior from inferior.” Later on, I said, “I know I am



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cutting against the grain of conformity and obsequiousness but I know there is more satisfaction to be an independent individual than a dependent member of the team or a cog in the machine.” At this point in the speech, I could see people shift awkwardly in their seats. Frank Mahovlich of the Leafs was sitting right in front of me and he almost fell off his chair. But I continued. “Track is probably a higher-class spectator sport than most. It has no crooks as in boxing or basketball, no tolerance of dirty tactics as in football or hockey, no immature appeal to mob psychology as in football and others, no gambling and far fewer lower elements than in most sports … Perhaps track’s intellectual appeal is the reason why it’s not as popular as sports based mainly on emotions. Yet to those who know track the emotions are there and that’s why we like it.” I could tell immediately I had put my foot in it. I sat down to boos and an awkward silence. Head table guest Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers passed along a note saying that he would like to meet me in the parking lot after the dinner, the traditional invitation to fight. (A few weeks later, he was suspended for betting on NFL teams and associating with known criminals.) Fortunately, Murray Halberg, another head table guest, walked me protectively out to the subway. I began to realize that in all his comments about me, Halberg was really offering supportive advice. In the days that followed, the media bombarded me with criticism. “Kidd Flunks Oratorical Test” ran the headline in the Montreal Star. The story by the Canadian Press said that “Bruce Kidd, a talented 19-year-old in political science and economics, has ambitions towards joining the diplomatic corps. If so, this young distance runner got off on the wrong foot the other night.” Dick Beddoes, the Globe and Mail sports columnist, called me a “Large Loser, who has everything going for him except himself.”4 That weekend, when I flew back from a race in Los Angeles, instead of the usual wave-through, the customs agent ordered me to take everything out of my bag and went through it piece by piece.

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On the other hand, Toronto controller Phillip Givens, a future mayor; George Snell, the head of the Anglican Church; and many others sent me personal letters of support. I wish I could say that I learned tact and diplomacy from the fallout from that speech, and that I learned to woo those who might agree with me rather than insult them. That would take time. I was too much into the “go for the jugular” mode that characterized the culture of undergraduate life and the Varsity to rein in the bombast. What I did take away from the episode was that I had hit home, and that there was scope for a critical voice in sports. The corporate sports establishment learned to be wary of me, and not to assume that I would go along with any characterization they imposed. There was one other beneficial outcome from that banquet. Murray Halberg was impressed by the idea of sports awards as a fund-raiser for children with disabilities. He flew home determined to replicate them in New Zealand. That very same year, he established a foundation to enhance the lives of children and youth with disabilities through sport, and to celebrate the country’s best athletes every year as a way of funding the foundation’s philanthropic activities. To this day, the Halberg Disability Sport Foundation conducts training for teachers and recreation leaders to help mainstream children with disabilities into sport and recreation. It also assists such children and youth with equipment, memberships, and other costs, and conducts the Halberg Games, an annual, national three-day competition for such athletes. A big chunk of the money comes from the annual banquet to honour the recipients of the Halberg Awards, New Zealand’s most prestigious athletic recognition.

7 GREAT EXPECTATIONS

After Perth, I turned my attention to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Fred and I agreed that I would try for both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres, the metric equivalents of the three and six miles. Fred stepped up the mileage and told reporters that we intended to go after the world records in the summer of 1963. He similarly accelerated Bill Crothers’s program. Then as now, the quadrennial Olympics was a major focus of the mass media. In addition to our own ambition, the pressure from the media intensified. I was referred to as a medal hope in virtually every story. The CBC commissioned a producer and a camera crew to follow my activities up to the Games. Milt Dunnell of the Toronto Star called me “the most publicized Canadian athlete in the last ten years.”1 It felt like half the people in Canada expected me to win. If I lost a race, or even won in less than record time, it was described as a “disappointment.” The indoor season began with promise. I returned to Boston, New York (twice), and Los Angeles with meet records in every two-mile race. I also ran well in that three-mile race at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and won a competitive mile in Philadelphia. Bill Crothers had an even more successful early 1963 season. He won everything he entered, including national championships in Canada, the US, and the UK, and came within

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a hair’s breadth of breaking Peter Snell’s indoor world in the 1,000 yards in Chicago. Another remarkable breakthrough came from Abby Hoffman. Abby first rocketed into prominence in 1956 when, as the all-star defenceman “Ab” Hoffman in the Little Toronto Hockey League, she was outed as female, to the consternation of the defenders of masculinity and female propriety. She was expelled from the league. Undaunted, she turned to swimming and then track and field. In 1962, she was the youngest member of the Canadian team in Perth, competing in the 880 yards. In January, she was the first Canadian woman ever to be invited to a major indoor meet, the Boston Knights of Columbus. After winning her race in record time, she became another Canadian mainstay of the indoor circuit. While modest in public, we were supremely confident among ourselves. Bill fantasized about holding up a pair of scissors on the starting line, so everyone could see he was planning to cut the finishing tape. Abby liked to call winning a race “reality maintenance.” But then I hit a series of disappointments and setbacks. In another Los Angeles meet, I ran a mile against Snell and the best Americans but was never in the race, finishing sixth out of seven. During the day, I had stayed in my hotel room writing an essay, and the experience was so invigorating that by the time my race came around, I was emotionally drained. I never realized it at the time, but it should have been a signal that there was a limit to my attention to track. Then an infected blister took forever to heal. Blisters were an occupational hazard from the friction generated by the constant turning on the rough, wooden tracks. While I took every precaution I could – soaking my feet in brine and Friar’s Balsam every day and taping and powdering them before every race – I got blisters in every race. I had to stay off my feet completely for two weeks. I returned to competition in a two-mile race in Chicago against the mile world record holder, Jim Beatty of the Igloi-coached Los



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Angeles Track Club, but couldn’t hold his fast early pace and finished third. It was frustrating not to be ready for that race, especially when Beatty set a world record, at 8:30.7. Second went to Beatty’s teammate Bob Schul, who was becoming a force to be reckoned with. I bounced back with another win in the Firestone 15 and a string of under-20 records in my last races as an age-class runner. After I won the National Steelcar War Veterans’ Association junior two-and-a-half-mile road race over the streets of Hamilton for the fifth consecutive time, the Onondaga chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, the band of legendary marathoner Tom Longboat, presented me with an eagle feather headdress, making me an honorary member of the tribe and an honorary messenger. The ceremony introduced me to the remarkable endurance culture and achievements of Iroquois runners. Then I ruptured my Achilles sheath in a 5,000 metres against Murray Halberg in Los Angeles. It forced me into another complete layoff. Bill Crothers, Fred, and I had long planned to race in Europe that August, and although I was not ready, Fred asked me to give it a try. While Bill won every race he entered, I didn’t win one of mine. In well-publicized races at the White City in London and Bislett Stadium in Oslo, I led into the straightaway, but others hauled me down. I also reinjured my plantar fascia. Embarrassed by my performances, deeply frustrated and angry with Fred, I left the team early and flew back to Toronto on my own. I was determined to get healthy and back in shape. I went back to what got me started, running on the grass, without a stopwatch, just for pleasure and endurance. With the exception of a two-mile race at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto where I lost to EYTC teammate Chris Williamson, it was almost a month before I went back to Fred and the track. I had one of my best cross-country seasons ever. In four consecutive weekends in November, I won the Ontario-Quebec intercollegiate

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(in Guelph), the Canadian AAU (Hamilton), the Canadian intercollegiate (Guelph), and the US AAU titles (New York), all against strong opposition. The Canadian intercollegiate weekend was highly emotional for other reasons. That summer, the newly elected federal government of Liberal Lester B. Pearson appointed a royal commission to study the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada. The commission was to make recommendations about the future of Canadian federalism, on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups. It was Pearson’s response to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the aspirations of Quebeckers for respect, a fairer deal from the rest of Canada, and, for some, complete independence. At U of T, the Varsity and the students’ council, led by features editor James Laxer and student president Douglas Ward, conducted a campus-wide series of educational meetings out of which came the view that English-speaking Canada should reach out to Quebec to renegotiate Confederation. As a Varsity associate editor, political science student, and Canadian nationalist, I contributed to these discussions. Ontario premier John Robarts was considered sympathetic, so on Friday, November 22, Jim and Doug organized a “March for Canada” to the Legislature. About 3,000 students, faculty, and staff marched in orderly formation, with little of the stereotypical rowdiness of later ’60s protests. Most of us wore jackets and ties and the speeches were respectful. There were cameras everywhere. Robarts gave us a polite if subdued hearing – I later learned from John Godfrey that Robarts had been drinking all night with Hart House warden Joe McCulley – and we filed happily back to campus, buoyed by what we thought was a successful intervention. I placed my placard against the back wall of the student building and walked inside, only to be met by people’s sobs and cries. US president John F. Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas.



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During the next 24 hours, there were endless, anguished conversations in the libraries, common rooms, and residences, and over the telephone, as we tried to make sense of the frightening assassination of such a popular leader and stay connected to the people we knew. The media relegated our successful march to the back page. I had little energy for racing when I drove to Guelph the following morning for the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union’s first ever men’s cross-country championship. It took place over the challenging 5.6-mile course set out over the experimental farm of the Ontario Agricultural College, with several fences and ploughed fields. The weather was sunny but 23 degrees Fahrenheit. After the starter told us to take off our sweats, he held us for a minute’s silence for the late president. We froze. Once he fired the gun, I warmed up very quickly in what turned out to be a fierce battle with EYTC teammate Chris Williamson, a student at the University of New Brunswick. We soon broke away from the rest of the field. Chris matched me stride for stride until the very last hill, when he suddenly gasped and disappeared. My time was almost 40 seconds faster than the record I had established two weeks previously over the same course in the Ontario-Quebec championship. My brother Ross was on the McMaster squad that won the team championship. It was a great day for the Kidds. The following Saturday I ran the US cross-country championship in New York’s Van Courtland Park. It was one of my most satisfying victories. The field included all the runners vying for places on the US Olympic Team. The race was held over the home course of perennial rival Peter McArdle. About halfway through the first lap of the two-lap, 10,000-metre course, I was running comfortably with a large group of runners that included Vic Zwolak, Ron Larrieu, and Billy Mills. We were in front, except for a slight runner dressed completely in white that I noticed about 100 yards ahead of us. “Who’s the rabbit?” I asked Zwolak, assuming it was

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someone who had been asked to set a fast early pace and then drop out. “That’s no rabbit,” Vic replied. “That’s McArdle.” The chase began. I made very little headway until the long “Cemetery Hill” about halfway through the last lap. McArdle sagged and I caught him at the top. Then the path narrowed, and for the next two miles, twisted and turned over countless tree roots. McArdle just flew, and it was all I could do to keep in contact and not trip. Fortunately, the last half mile was on flat grass and I managed to eke out a narrow win. Billy Mills was a distant third. The calendar year closed a month later in San Francisco when I easily won a two-mile race at the Cow Palace. It was my 36th race of the year. In the hotel, two young men there to run the high school two-mile race, Jim Ryun and Gerry Lindgren, asked to meet me. Both were putting in big mileage. While their coaches and parents were supportive, they faced considerable criticism about the “physiological risks” they were taking and the dangers of “burning out.” They knew I had faced the same criticism and wanted to know how I dealt with it. I encouraged them to get proper nutrition and rest and stay the course. Lindgren promptly won the two miles in nine minutes flat and, a few weeks later, ran 8:46, a hair faster than my best two miles at 17. I felt I was handing the torch to the next generation. After the race, I flew to Victoria to represent the Varsity at the national convention of Canadian University Press. I was then writing a weekly column on student activities across Canada, based on a reading of the newspapers from other campuses I received in the mail. The conference enabled me to meet other student journalists, and I established what became a lifelong friendship with the CUP president, John Macfarlane from the University of Alberta. The year 1964 promised to be a challenging one. Just before the New Year, Ron Clarke smashed the world record for the six miles and lowered the record for the 10,000 metres in a club meet in Melbourne, Australia. After the world list came out, I could see that many others had times faster than mine. Some were familiar



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faces from the Commonwealth and some were Europeans I read about for the first time. After my dismal outdoor season in 1963, I was not even ranked in the top ten. Only two Canadians were on the list – Bill Crothers, ranked first in the 800/880, and shot putter Dave Steen at seventh. I was still struggling with a recurring pain in my heel that limited running at speed. I had to miss the first three meets of the indoor season to get it under control. The only thing that seemed to work was a cortisone injection, but every dose seemed to have a shorter effect. By the end of the summer, I was getting a shot every other week. When I did resume racing in the three miles at the Maple Leaf Gardens meet in Toronto, Albie Thomas of Australia led all the way in setting a new world record, while I ran shoulder to shoulder with Bob Schul about ten seconds behind. Schul outsprinted me for second. Then I won five of my next six races, beating Clarke and Schul over two and three miles in New York, and setting new Canadian and British records for two miles in London, England. My only loss was in a photo finish to Schul in Chicago. Bob and I talked after the race and conceded that we both could run a lot faster. Yet when we moved outdoors and stepped up the quantity and quality of the workouts, my breakthroughs never came. In Modesto, Bill Baillie of New Zealand outsprinted me in a two-mile race (although I did lower my Canadian record and beat Jim Beatty). In Compton, after battling with Gerry Lindgren for most of the race, I faded as Schul broke my US record and Baillie, Ron Larrieu, and Lindgren pulled away. That seemed to be the pattern for the summer of 1964. I put in stupendous workouts yet I raced with little success. While I easily won the Canadian Olympic Trials in the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres, I was outclassed in the British AAA six miles, where Mike Bullivant set a new British record of 27:26.6. While I lowered my Canadian record to 27:56.4, I let the leaders go at the crucial four-mile mark of the race.

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Fred told reporters that I had lost my competitive edge and the media freely speculated on my state of mind. I contributed to these discussions, confessing that I was “beginning to wonder if my running should be the be-all and end-all of my existence.” I shared that I was unsure about life after university. I wanted to do something altruistic, like teach in the Canadian hinterland, as my brother Ross was doing with Frontier College, or contribute to public policy in one of the newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean, as a growing number of my peers were doing in the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). It was an unsettling time for other reasons as well. I had not done well in my exams, putting applications to law and graduate schools in jeopardy. The Swintons, the family with whom I had lived for the previous two years while at university, moved to England, so I had to find another place to stay. Years later, Ron Clarke told me that he could well understand why I had such a difficult year in 1964, and that his running only prospered (after a brilliant early career as a teenager and then five years in the doldrums) when he achieved stability in his work and home life. I had no such perspective at the time. Although I never admitted it, I was probably overtraining. I refused to build adequate recovery into my routine or give up my summer job for the Star so that I could have relaxing days, as Fred and several friends urged me to do. Even though I was always tired, whenever I ran a mediocre time, I resolved to train harder. Fred felt powerless to stop me. And then I tore another tendon in my foot, the tibialis posterior, while warming up for a two-mile race at the annual Labour Day meet at the Canadian National Exhibition. At first, it was not painful. I just lost forward thrust from that foot. I won that race and several others before we left for Tokyo by adjusting my foot plant. But gradually, it became quite painful and I couldn’t get a satisfactory diagnosis. I simply got further shots, taped it up, and soldiered on.



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The Canadian Olympic Team left for Tokyo with great fanfare. Hopes were high for the 15-member track team, with six of us touted as medal hopes – Bill Crothers, Harry Jerome, high jumper Diane Gerace, sprinter Irene Piotrowski, walker Alex Oakley, and me. We left Vancouver on October 2, after a lavish banquet hosted by BC premier W.A.C. Bennett. In some ways, Tokyo was the Olympics of my dreams, exemplifying the Olympic ideal in every way. It was a thrill to be in the Olympic Village, a former housing estate of the US army of occupation turned into an international community of sport and peace. I reconnected with athletes I knew, met many more I had only heard about, and tried out all the dining halls and their extraordinary variety of menus. While I have always been a Canadian nationalist, the Olympics taught me to balance that with humanitarian internationalism. Getting around was easy – there were free yellow bicycles everywhere, my first experience with such an intelligent policy initiative. We spent little time on buses getting to the venues. The practice track was located within the Village and the National Stadium was only a 30-minute walk. Right next door was the breathtaking two-facility National Gymnasium for swimming, diving, and basketball, designed by Kenzo Tange. I’d never seen poured concrete look so lyrical. The only problem was that it was rainy and cold for days in a row. The 1964 Olympics were “maximal” Games, undertaken as the capstone of a multi-year plan to rebuild Tokyo and the Japanese economy after the devastation of the Second World War, two atom bombs, and the US occupation. The Games provided the finishing touch to technological, social, and cultural regeneration across Japanese society. New highways, trains, and subway lines were constructed, the high-speed Shinkansen (“bullet train”) with initial speeds of 320 kpm put into service, and Haneda International Airport modernized. Colour television and other electronics and their brands

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(Sony and Panasonic transistor tape recorders, Nikon and Canon cameras, and Seiko timing devices and touchpads) came on the market for the first time. The national government revitalized sports, physical education, and workplace fitness and recreation with beautiful new parks and sports facilities. Those games have since been criticized for block-busting construction and the lack of community consultation, but I experienced them as a dramatic demonstration of the role sport could play in the well-being of society. I saw many of these developments and innovations first-hand, because we arrived in Tokyo a week before the Opening Ceremony and had time to explore the city. We were encouraged by the organizing committee, which arranged visits to Japanese homes, cultural performances, and shrines, and by Canadian track and field manager Jim Daly, who shared my ambition to make the most of the Games. Jim was one of Canada’s most imaginative and ambitious sports leaders. At the time, he was the chief executive officer of Winnipeg’s 1967 Pan American Games. He took us all over Tokyo. We had several memorable adventures together, including an afternoon-long visit to Tokyo’s sprawling Tsukiji fish market, one of the most amazing enterprises I had ever seen. I needed the material. I was writing three columns a week for Canadian student newspapers. I also needed to know the city to get my copy to the airport. Canadian University Press could not afford the cost of cables, so it made a special arrangement with Canadian Pacific Airlines. Three times a week, I folded my column, typed directly onto paper, into a paper envelope and took the new subway lines and the new monorail to the newly modernized airport. I walked right through the terminal and handed the envelope to the pilot in the cockpit, who delivered it to an editor at Malton airport in Toronto. There was no security at either airport. The Opening Ceremonies were breathtaking, setting a new standard for ceremonies as an art form. I particularly remember the re-broadcast of a speech by Olympic founder Pierre de



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Coubertin that was first played at the 1936 Olympics a year before his death. I was also deeply moved by the arrival of the Olympic Torch, just as my father had been in Helsinki 12 years earlier. This time it wasn’t a celebrated athlete who ran up the steps to light the cauldron but 19-year-old Yoshinori Sakai, who had been born in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day the US dropped the atom bomb on the city. I felt very proud to be part of an international movement that contributed to healing, regeneration, and intercultural understanding. Unfortunately, my athletic experience was not as rewarding. I ran twice a day, usually in the morning with Billy Mills (who was in remarkable shape), Ron Larrieu, and Peter McArdle, and then again at the track in the afternoon, but I was always sore and it was difficult to run easily. On the one day I felt good, I did much more than planned, which led New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard to crow later that I had left my race on the practice track. There was no medical support or physiotherapy for the Canadian team. Once Abby Hoffman (who was also injured) and I begged treatment from one of the US trainers we knew, but it was embarrassing. Canada was still in the dark ages when it came to sports medicine and science. Years later, the Soviet track coach in Tokyo, Gavriil Korobkov, told me that he not only had access to a full medical staff but daily urine and weekly blood analysis for every athlete. Our coaches wouldn’t have known what to do with such information. Thirty-eight men from 23 countries lined up at the start of the 10,000-metre final on October 14. There were no heats. While I had been preparing for this race for at least five years and I should have been ready, I had little confidence going in. The race remains a blur. The little I remember has been augmented from the films of the race. I went out quickly, ran with the leaders for about two kilometres, and then fell back. With little hope of winning,

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I gave up entirely and just ran to finish, placing 26th, a few metres behind defending champion Pyotr Bolotnikov. It was humiliating. I have pondered all the “what ifs” all my life. What if I had felt less pressure, and simply decided to run my best and show Clarke and the others what I could do, rather than feeling burdened by the expectation that anything less than the gold medal was a failure? What if someone had just said, “Go out and enjoy the race, just like any other race”? Maybe I would have started in a different frame of mind. As it was, I took a very long and lonely walk back to the Olympic Village, and then I had to find an explanation for the Canadian reporters. Two days later, I lost my nerve again in the heats of the 5,000 and didn’t qualify. I took little consolation from the fact that both races were won by Americans I knew and had beaten previously, Mills and Bob Schul. Almost 60 years later, I still shudder when I think of those races. I felt my life was over. The only joy came from seeing Bill finish second to Snell in the 800 and Harry win the bronze in the 100 and run well in their other events. It was little consolation at the time, but in the last few days of the Games, several of my competitors, including Ron Clarke and Murray Halberg, went out of their way to reassure me that I would bounce back. It was also moving to see the intercultural nature of many of the victory parties in the Olympic dining hall. I suspect that’s why I ended my columns for Canadian University Press with an expression of faith in international sport: Win, lose or draw, the Olympic experience cements our faith in the de Coubertin ideals. I wish every Canadian could share the international competitive fellowship of the Olympics. That everyone has gone through the same mill of competition provides a common bond which overcomes all differences – here the misunderstandings of race, colour, and creed are truly banished.2

8 LANE THREE

On the last curve of the 10K in Tokyo, as Ron Clarke, Mohammed Gammoudi, and Billy Mills were about to lap me on their desperate sprints to the finish, I stepped into lane three to cheer them on. My friend John MacAloon of the University of Chicago once said that that was the moment of my transition from a runner to an up-close observer and organizer. It may not have been at that very moment, but the Tokyo Olympics changed my life, opening up new horizons and pushing me in directions I had only wondered about previously. In the months after Tokyo I first ventured into what would ultimately become three major concerns of my life – ­sport studies, sport leadership, and sport for development. I came to t­ hree realizations in Tokyo. In the first place, with the scale of the Games, I began to see that the Olympics, and by extension, international and domestic sport, touch upon and are integrated with every other aspect of society. We take that for granted now, but in the age of Avery Brundage and “sport and politics do not mix,” when very few governments outside the Soviet bloc were significantly involved in sport, conventional wisdom had it that sport was a world apart. Up until then, although I studied political economy and my professors did not question my running, they and I kept my interest in sports completely fenced off from my

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studies. After the Olympics, I began to wonder whether I could bring the political economy lens to sports. My second realization was that the world was much bigger, more diverse, and worthy of attention than the largely white developed areas of North America, the UK, Europe, and Australia I had studied in university and came to know through my travels in track. The known world was rapidly changing. Ron Clarke said it revealingly after the 10K: “Crikey. I ran away from the very best in the world, only to find myself still battling an Ethiopian [Mamo Wolde], a Tunisian [Gammoudi], and a Red Sioux Indian [Mills]!” It was the beginning of the African running revolution, with 12 new African National Olympic Committees participating, accelerating the entry of countries that freed themselves from colonialism that continues to this day. The non-western world brought different cultures and different politics to international sports, along with fascinating possibilities for study and adventure. Japanese customs, food, and architecture were intriguing too. After my events, I spent several days travelling in the south of Japan, staying in traditional Japanese inns and eating exclusively in Japanese restaurants, communicating for the most part by gestures. It was the first time I had travelled outside European cultures or allowed myself (lest I get sick) to try foods so different from my own. The trip whetted my appetite for further travel in Asia. My third realization was that, in some way, the Olympics and international sports were inescapably connected to progressive politics. The issues that most deeply affected me were South Africa and Hiroshima. Of the National Olympic Committees (NOCs) eligible for Tokyo, all but three took part: Indonesia and South Africa were banned and North Korea stayed away. Although I didn’t fully understand Indonesia’s exclusion – ­it was only later that I learned that it was because it hosted the 1963 Games of the Emerging Forces as a Global South alternative to the Olympics – I­ well understood the suspension of apartheid South Africa. Just as we had in Perth, we



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discussed it in the Village. It was not just a Commonwealth issue but one that affected the entire world. I was already a supporter of nuclear disarmament when I arrived in Tokyo, but my experiences in Japan gave it an unforgettable emotional immediacy. After my events, I made a pilgrimage to Hiroshima to visit the Memorial Peace Park and Museum, which commemorate and document the 140,000 people killed by the US nuclear attack of August 6, 1945. It was sickening to see the destruction rendered by what was called “the little bomb,” a weapon far smaller than the warheads now available. How could anyone do that to other humans! Wherever I went, Japanese people of all ages would approach me, bow, and although they knew no English, say “No more Hiroshima.” It was impossible not to realize that the symbolism of a common humanity fostered through international sports is what matters for many, perhaps most, people. After Tokyo, I had no hesitation about linking sports to progressive causes. I took a fourth lesson from Tokyo, but that came later. I gradually realized that if I could survive the humiliation of defeat at the Olympics, I could survive anything. When I returned to Toronto, I was completely numb. I can’t remember another period in my life when I felt so miserable. I lost two intercollegiate cross-country races. While I was short-listed for a Rhodes Scholarship, something I had also been expected to win, I had little energy for the interview and was unsuccessful. Yet I was determined to make the most of my last year as an undergraduate. My mother had always said that her fourth year at Victoria College was the most rewarding. Everything she had learned up to that point came together and helped her focus on what became her career in early childhood education. Now that the Olympics were over, she encouraged me to give everything to my studies. I took her advice very seriously. I tried to put my life back together.

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In addition to catching up with courses, I saw a series of orthopaedic specialists. They persuaded me to undergo two operations – ­one to address the chronic plantar fasciitis in my heel and the other to repair the torn tendons in my ankle. I scheduled the first for just before Christmas, and the second immediately after my final exams in May. The surgeon I chose, Dr. William Virgin of Toronto’s Orthopaedic and Arthritic Hospital, had treated a number of ballet dancers with similar injuries. He gave me the confidence that he knew what he was doing. I moved into residence – ­­fortunately the brand-new New College Residence had vacancies – a­ nd sold my car. For the rest of the academic year, I rarely left the St. George campus. I camped out in the library, continued to write for the Varsity, served on the library committee at Hart House, and caught as much theatre, public talks, and art exhibitions as I could. I quickly became too busy to feel very sorry for myself. I count myself lucky that I studied in the last years of the honours undergraduate program in political economy. It was a time when the stars of the department vied to teach the compulsory courses, and faculty went out of their way to get to know students. The curriculum was tightly concentrated: I had very few courses outside political economy. All courses ran the entire academic year. Within a few years, that approach gave way to the liberalized curriculum of maximal student choice and abbreviated “half courses” that have become the norm today. The integrated department of political economy, predicated on the idea that one could not study politics without an understanding of economics and vice versa, lasted only a few years longer, to be split into separate departments of political science and economics. It was J. Stefan Dupré who encouraged my emerging interest in the political economy of sports. A leading analyst of federal-provincial-municipal relations, Professor Dupré taught a seminar on Canadian federalism. He was jovial but tough. In his very first lecture the previous year, he told us that he had happily



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failed students at Harvard and he was prepared to do the same at U of T. In the fourth-year seminar I took with him, he gave the first lecture on an obscure theory of German federalism to winnow out those shopping for an easy course. In that fourth-year course, 50 per cent of the grade was based on a major research paper. When I asked to write mine on the role of government in Canadian sports, he clapped his hands, telling me that such analysis was long overdue. He suggested I study the federal-provincial relationships underlying the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act of 1961. In those early days of FAS, fully half the federal money went into a conditional grant program administered by the provinces. I threw myself into that paper, visiting the respective departments in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park, interviewing the senior civil servants, and collecting and poring over documents. Up to that point, no one had ever written comprehensively about the legislation and the programs, so I was welcomed and given considerable support. I already knew something about FAS. In its first years, journalists asked me what I thought. Although my knowledge was limited to the little reported in the newspapers, I endorsed the emphasis upon broadly based participation but was critical of the appointments of professional sports leaders to the National Advisory Council. Researching and writing the paper was eye opening. It immersed me in the layers of legislation, regulations, policies, and programs and the challenges governments face when they seek to influence the physical fitness of the population, increase participation in recreation, and transform a traditionally private sphere like sports. I encountered first-hand the tensions between the politicians and civil servants; the competition for financial support and legitimacy among advocates of high-performance sport, mass recreation, research, and education; and the complexities of federal-provincial relations. Robert Frost once said that “education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher

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level of regard.” That was my experience studying FAS. I quickly developed new respect for the difficulties, and the commitment, professionalism, and thoughtfulness of the responsible civil servants and the volunteer leaders. FAS was the fourth attempt by the federal government during the twentieth century to strengthen organized physical activity and sport across Canada. During the previous effort – ­the National Physical Fitness Act of 1943 – ­federal-provincial conflicts so irritated the Mackenzie King government that it wanted out. In 1954, it allowed the agreements with the provinces to expire and repealed the legislation. One of the people I interviewed in Ottawa was Dr. Doris Plewes. At the time, she was establishing what became the Sport Information Resource Centre (SIRC). Plewes had been a senior civil servant in health and welfare for many years. She was bright, funny, and inspirational with a detailed lived history of the various federal efforts. I quickly became a fan, but several men told me that she scared them. Apparently, one deputy minister, George Davidson, even hid under his desk when she came to see him. Plewes told me that the Liberals feared the politics of sport so much that they never would have created FAS if they had stayed in power. Writing that paper spurred my interest in further work in sports policy. As a result of the research I conducted, I got a job in Fitness and Amateur Sport that summer and a full-time job the following year in the Ontario Department of Community Programs, which administered Ontario’s share of the FAS budget that went to the provinces. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was almost starting on the ground floor. Another professor who influenced my life course was Stephen Triantis. The Olympics had encouraged me to contemplate a trip or project in the Global South. At home for Christmas, my father planted the idea of working for a year in India. He was considering an adult education project at the University of Rajasthan



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and said that if he decided to do it, I should come along. I talked about it with Professor Triantis. He encouraged me to write an essay about foreign aid in India. Professor Triantis challenged many of my comfortable assumptions about the uncomplicated benefit of foreign aid. While he was supportive of western philanthropy, he was critical of the tied nature of many programs. First World nations used aid to open markets for their own products while maintaining high tariffs against the products from those same developing nations. “We cannot expect to make friends out of under-developed countries by helping them produce a greater output by more efficient methods and then preventing them from competing with our products,” he said. He introduced me to the critical literature about volunteering and encouraged me to see for myself. My musings about India turned into a real trip. I was part of a group of students in political economy who met for dinner with a professor once a month. They were occasions for political and academic gossip, good food, and abundant drink. At our March dinner, the invited professor unexpectedly cancelled, so we went around the room outlining our plans for post-graduation. Everyone up to me talked about law or graduate school. While I had applied to law and graduate schools myself, I began thinking out loud about driving to India and working there. Earl Rosen, the classmate sitting beside me, quickly added more details. Our improvised trip became the talk of the evening. It may well have ended there, except that the following night, I met Star reporter Paul Rimstead at Hart House to go for dinner. I was walking out with John Laskin, another classmate who had been at the dinner the evening before. Paul invited him to join us. At some point, the discussion turned to future plans. John said, “Why don’t you tell him about your trip to India?” I outlined my dream again, inventing even more details. The following day it was a banner headline in the Star.1 Earl’s parents were horrified.

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Yet very quickly a Land Rover dealer called with an attractive offer, and a large number of people called to say they wanted to join. I’m sure I could have taken a busload. While I had also been thinking about CUSO, the momentum for my own trip proved irreversible. I decided upon a small group – ­Earl, Dwayne Wright (whom I’d known since nursery school), track teammate Nelles Van Loon, and John Scott, another U of T friend. We began to plan in earnest. My next adventure came from Doug Ward of the Canadian Union of Students (CUS), a former president of the U of T student council. The international student movement was deeply divided by the Cold War. The national student associations from the capitalist countries were members of the International Student Conference (ISC) and those from the Soviet bloc were members of the International Union of Students (IUS). There was little dialogue between the two sides. The student leaders in CUS and the United States National Students’ Association (USNSA) were tired of the strictures of the Cold War. They felt that they could contribute to a more peaceful world through dialogue with their counterparts in the Soviet bloc. The only international body where student representatives from both western and Communist countries rubbed shoulders was la Fédération Internationale du Sport Universitaire (FISU), which conducted the biennial World Student Games (Universiade). CUS and USNSA sought membership in FISU. To do that, they had to know something about sports. Doug turned to me. I welcomed the opportunity. British runners had told me about their enjoyable experiences at the 1961 Universiade in Sofia, ­Bulgaria, and the 1963 Games in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It bothered me that Canadians could not enter. I wanted to correct that. I also loved the idea that it could be students, not athletic directors, who would organize Canadian participation. I felt we could do a much better job. During the course of my four years at U of T, I had become disillusioned about the commitment of the athletic



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department and the university as a whole to sport. Along with fellow students on the track team and at the Varsity, I was bursting with ideas for reform. It was a chance to channel my love for sport in another way. Getting FISU membership for CUS turned out to be easy. There was no competition. FISU had previously approached the fledging Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU), composed of the men’s athletic departments from across Canada, but the CIAU turned it down. Their priorities were men’s football, men’s hockey, and men’s basketball, not the full range of men’s and women’s sports in FISU. The women’s athletic directors were neither interested nor prepared. All I had to do was get a letter from Jim Worrall, the president of the Canadian Olympic Association, whom I knew well, attesting to the fact that CUS was the national body for students. Jim wrote the letter and FISU gave us the franchise. Assembling a team for the 1965 World Student Games in Budapest was another story. We had no money, no structure of student-organized competitions from which to pick a team, and few communication avenues to athletes. A recent split with the French-speaking unions in Quebec preoccupied the CUS leadership. The precipitating issue was CUS’s successful lobbying for a strengthened federal student loan scheme – t­ he Canadian Student Loan Program of 1964. The Qué­bécois unions, in support of premier Jean Lesage, resented the federal government’s intervention in what they regarded as the p ­ rovincial/national sphere of higher education and left to form their own association, l’Union générale des étudiants du Québec (UGEQ). Along with the Quebec-based student press association, Presse étudiante nationale, UGEQ was dedicated to political, economic, social, and cultural progress for both students and the whole French Canadian Nation. Several of the CUS leaders, including president Jean Bazin, were from Quebec. It meant that the CUS leadership had very little energy to devote to sports.

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I began planning for a representative team. I put together a draft budget, canvassed for donations and grants, reached out to the athletes I knew, and advertised the opportunities as broadly as possible. I recruited my former mentor Ron Wallingford, a faculty member at McMaster University, to serve as team coach and help with the selections. We couldn’t afford selection trials, so we invited athletes to apply by mail. We asked them to document their athletic abilities and tell us how they would contribute to the seminars about university sport that we were told to expect. According to the rules at the time, athletes were eligible if they were citizens of the country they would represent, so Canadian athletes on US athletic scholarships could take part. They had to be under the age of 28, and not more than two years beyond graduation. We could enter women as well as men. We received about 100 applications – ­what is now denigrated as “snail mail” could be very efficient. One late winter day, Robert Rabinovich, who represented the CUS executive, Ron, and I met in Hart House to determine a tentative team based upon several different budget options. I finished the academic year with flying colours, graduating with first-class honours and my highest marks ever. After successful surgery on both ankles, I returned to Ottawa for the summer to live with my family, do rehab, work at FAS and CUS, and prepare for India. At FAS, I contributed a small study to the planning for the Canada Winter Games. The idea of a pan-Canadian multi-sport event had a long, unrealized history. Amateur leader Norton Crow first called for Canadian Olympics in 1910, but that and subsequent similar proposals came to naught. It was only when Minister of Health and Welfare Judy Lamarsh proposed such games for Canada’s Centennial that it was accepted. The first Games – ­to be winter games – ­were scheduled for Quebec in 1967. Many details needed to be hammered out, especially the basis of participation. Two of the civil servants I was working with – ­­assistant



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deputy minister John Macdonald and financial director Gerry Lahaie – ­ were advocating provincial teams and province-by-­ province competition as a way of strengthening participation and the level of performance across the country. O ­ thers thought that the competitors should come from the top ten in every event in the previous year’s national championships, regardless of residence. I supported Macdonald’s and Lahaie’s idea. My experience in Canadian track and field and cross-country had been that, except for Olympic years, championships were national in name only. Most competitors came from the region where the events were held, so that even a list of top ten was distorted. I felt that giving every province and territory the opportunity to field a team would stimulate development. Through a study of the previous ten years of championships in athletics and swimming, I demonstrated the weakness of relying upon the national championships. That work led to an invitation to the media conference in Quebec to announce the Canada Games, on Jean Baptiste Day (as Fête Nationale was then called). Given the successful history of the Canada Games as an interprovincial developmental event – ­at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyongChang, 34 per cent of the Canadian team had first competed in the Canada Winter Games – ­I’ve always felt that we made the right decision. At CUS, I helped put together the lobbying campaign to persuade FAS to fund the FISU team. The CIAU strenuously opposed our application. It was a white-knuckle experience. We were forced to keep athletes in the dark almost up until the day we left. In the end, FAS came through and we were able to send ten athletes in three sports (athletics, fencing, and swimming) plus Ron and a head of delegation, Paul Ladouceur from CUS. At the same time, I worked on the idea of a student-led Canadian Union of Student Sports (CUSS). Several western Canadian student unions had called for a position paper on university sport. CUSS would be independent of CUS in the manner of Canadian

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University Press (CUP) and serve as a foil to the CIAU. Most of all, as I wrote my co-conspirator, Rick Kollins, in an eerily prophetic letter: I would like to see it much more concerned with plowing back into the sport the athletic brains that go through the colleges. This is virgin field here. I’ve mentioned clinics – ­there’s an infinite potentiality in other sorts of leadership programs. And something I’ve always been interested in – ­sport sociology. What values does sport inculcate in Canada? What values do we want to look up to in athletics? How can we make sport a meaningful part of our college education, without having to go to Exhibition Stadium every other Sunday to see a blue 24-legged animal that lives in the cellar? I spent four frustrated years at U of T, Rick, waiting for someone else to bell the cat. Through CUSS, we could have an answer.

By late July, we were ready to go. My father accepted the job in Rajasthan, so my mother and two youngest siblings accompanied him. My 14-year-old brother David joined us for the drive across Europe and Asia. Earl and I got jobs teaching political science at the University of Rajasthan, and Dwayne, John, and Nelles got jobs elsewhere in India. We flew to London, collected our new Land Rover at the factory in Solihull, crossed the Channel, and turned left. The plan was to drive through France, Germany, and Austria to arrive in Budapest in time for the World Student Games, then continue through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India. Doug Ward appointed me associate secretary for sports and a CUS ambassador to other student unions, so we had contacts along the way. I can still remember my excitement when we boarded the flight to London on August 5, 1965. I felt that while one stage of my life was coming to an end, an even more rewarding one was beginning.

9 GAP YEAR

After years of airtight schedules, demanding academic and ­athletic requirements, and constant scrutiny, it was liberating to travel open-endedly. In the weeks before departure, we mapped our route in minute detail. When we drove off the ferry at Calais, we were so giddy with adventure that we completely abandoned the plan and dedicated the trip to Serendipity. The Land Rover gave us the flexibility. It could go anywhere, as we discovered in Iran and India on roads so deeply potholed that we had to drive across the adjacent desert. We had sleeping bags, a tent, a portable toilet, and a stove, so we could stay anywhere too – in rooftop hotels, campgrounds, or fields beside the road. We had our own music. Nelles and David bought guitars and David a portable record player. They played the Beatles endlessly. We had a set of bocce balls to fill moments of delay or boredom. We distributed pins of the new maple leaf flag to let everyone know we were Canadian. It was our “Grand Tour” of western civilization. John, who had studied art and archaeology, guided us through cathedrals, galleries, palaces, and cemeteries. He had written essays and exams on many of them. “If I remember properly,” he would say, “there should be a statue of [some famous personage] somewhere around here,” and a few steps along we would find it.

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In Vienna, I went ahead to Budapest to join the Canadian team at the World Student Games, accompanied by another U of T friend, David Griner. It was our first experience with the “Iron Curtain,” and we had to wait several hours to cross the grimly armed Austrian-Hungarian border. Despite clear economic shortages and extensive bullet damage from the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Budapest was beautiful, with well-designed athletic facilities in every neighbourhood. If a poor country suffering the ravages of war and revolution could provide such abundant opportunities for sport and physical activity, we wondered, why couldn’t a rich country like Canada? We felt like orphans. CUS didn’t have money for uniforms, so we asked everyone to bring their own blazer. Nothing matched. When we showed up for the Opening Ceremonies, the officials tried to turn us away. It took all of Ron’s powers of persuasion to get us into the athletes’ parade and the stadium. We were excluded from the seminar on student sports issues for which we had prepared as well. It turned out to be a formal academic conference on sports administration. None of the presenters was a student, and few of the other 32 delegations were led by students. The FISU president was a 42-year-old Italian businessman, Primo Nebiolo. When we asked him where the other students were, he shooed us away, saying that “students should be training for their competitions.” He had no interest in a stronger student voice in university sport, let alone student control. Years later, when Nebiolo was president of the International Association of Athletics Federations and regularly accused of corruption, cheating, and doping, I was not surprised. But among the athletes and coaches, it felt like old home. There was a festive, inclusive spirit that cut across all the political and ideological divides. I caught up with several former rivals, including Bob Schul, and made several new friends. Canada did very well in the track competitions, with Bill ­Crothers winning the 800, and Harry Jerome, Abby Hoffman, and



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George Puce taking bronze medals in the 100, 800, and discus respectively. Bill was so excited by his win that he took his victory bouquet to the main square and gave stems to women. I found the victory ceremony particularly moving. Instead of the national anthem of the gold medallists, the loudspeakers blared out Gaudeamus igitur (“Let us rejoice”), the international student song. The scoreboard showed the words, and whether on the field or in the stands, everyone sang together. It created a genuine feeling of international solidarity. My comrades arrived from Vienna just as the Closing Ceremonies were concluding, and we set out for (the former) Yugoslavia. With the visas we had, we were required to leave Hungary by midnight. We barely made it. Unlike the border to Austria and the West, there was minimal security, and even though we didn’t have any Yugoslavian currency to pay the fee, the young female official waved us through. We drove through Yugoslavia and Greece to Athens, then followed the coast of the Aegean to Turkey and Istanbul. It was a journey back in time. The further east we travelled, the more uncertain the roads, the less mechanized the agriculture. I photographed roadside abattoirs and men threshing wheat with wooden sleds drawn by horses. In Greece, we climbed Mount Olympus, sprinted across the ancient mountain stadium at Delphi, and ran laps at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, excavated for the Zappas Olympics in 1870 and renovated for the first Coubertin Olympics in 1896. We marvelled at the Parthenon, discovered calamari and retsina, and danced like Zorba. We had so much fun. We feasted on foods and flavours I had never experienced. While my mother was always nutrition-conscious, I realized that her cooking had always been English-Canadian bland. It was the first time I wondered whether she was less than perfect. In Istanbul, moments after John took us through the Topkapi Palace, we read in the International New York Herald Tribune that

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war had broken out between India and Pakistan, with heavy fighting in Kashmir and the Punjab. That was our intended route! We immediately packed up and drove to Ankara, the Turkish capital, to get some advice from the Canadian embassy. The political attaché thought that both armies would run out of weapons in a few weeks, and suggested we head to the Mediterranean to chill out. That we did, visiting ancient Persian and Greek cities, Crusader castles, and glorious beaches. But when we returned to Ankara ten days later, little had changed. So we continued to Tehran, driving along the eastern Black Sea, passing some of the most beautiful valleys and beaches I had ever seen. While we had encountered many other youthful travellers in Europe and Istanbul, the further east we went, the fewer we met. In Iran, we seemed completely on our own. In Tehran, we were told again that the war would end shortly (a United Nations-mandated ceasefire was declared one week later). We also learned that a cholera epidemic had broken out in ­Afghanistan. The Pakistan ambassador warned us against trying to drive through his country even if the war had ended. “Frankly,” he said, in a sobering lesson about the limits of the state in traditional societies, “my government does not control many parts of Pakistan. Your shiny, new car would certainly be stolen, and you might well be raped, even killed.” It was a bitter disappointment not to see the storied Khyber Pass on the Afghan-Pakistan border. I slowly realized that we were incredibly naïve in assuming a western level of public health and state control across Asia. Plan B was a boat from the Persian Gulf to India. We drove south through Iran, visiting Isfahan, the ancient city of Persepolis, and Shiraz, all dazzlingly beautiful, to the port of Khorramshahr, and sailed on the British-owned steamer MS Dwarka for Bombay (now Mumbai). While we stayed comfortably in the few cabins available for Europeans, approximately 2,000 Indian Muslim pilgrims sat, slept, and cooked on the deck below. We stopped off in what



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were then little village ports – Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain, Muscat, and Oman – before crossing the Arabian Sea to Bombay. Bombay is spectacular from the sea and our hearts were pounding from excitement when we docked. While it took us a week to get the Land Rover through customs, my first experience with the cumbersome, indifferent bureaucracies that provide public services across India, the sights, sounds, and smells of the city were more than consolation for the frustration of the delay. We explored long beaches, throbbing markets, chaotic temples, and the beautiful but grim Tower of Silence, where vultures consume Zoroastrian corpses laid out under the open sky. I had never seen anything like it. The war had ended while we were at sea, but an evening curfew was still in effect. So we camped out every evening in the bar of the magnificent Taj Mahal Hotel across the street from the Salvation Army hostel where we stayed. Because Maharashtra was a dry state, we had to get medical licences to buy beer. Once we got the car, we drove all night, dodging cows and goats on the narrow roads to get to our various jobs. I had been hired to teach political science at Maharajah’s College in Jaipur, the spectacular, pink-hued, postcard capital of the northern, desert state of Rajasthan. I would live with my parents, David, Earl, and my younger sister Dorothy in a house outside the city walls on the edge of the University of Rajasthan campus. It was a grim arrival. Moments after we parked the car, a loud, wailing procession passed our house carrying an open corpse smothered in marigolds up to the sand dunes at the end of the street. The mourners built a funeral pyre and set the corpse ablaze. The episode became even grimmer the following morning. When I reported for work, I learned that the deceased had been the head of the English department. He died of tetanus – he had never been vaccinated. When I asked his brother, also a faculty member, who would care for the family, he shrugged fatalistically and said “God will provide.”

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Course loads had already been reassigned, and I was designated the emergency replacement. I had one day to prepare for compulsory first-year classes in English grammar and literature. Maharajah’s College was one of six constituent colleges of the University of Rajasthan, a state university established with Indian independence in 1947. The College had a much older history. It was created in 1844 by the then maharajah of Jaipur, Sawai Ram Singh II, to provide a British-style education for the male children of the ruling elites. The British had forced Jaipur into submission a few years earlier. The College buildings and grounds were designed by a British architect, and the campus looked like Trinity College at the University of Toronto. The gothic look and the curriculum, based entirely upon British texts I had studied in Canadian schools, were daily reminders of the enduring, global legacies of British colonialism. Earl taught at Maharani’s College, which had been established for upper-class women in 1944. It, too, looked like Trinity College. With Indian independence and the new state’s ideals of accessible public education, the two colleges were open to qualified youth of all backgrounds. I had two classes of approximately 60 students each and two distinct groups of male students in each class. On one side, there were upper-class men in immaculate blue blazers and silk scarves and ties from private English-language boarding schools who spoke and wrote English comfortably. On the other, there were young men in white cotton dhotis from the rural areas, working classes, and lower castes. They were bright – they had to be to get that far – but struggled with English, a difficult language (Hindi has regular verbs and no articles, to cite just two of the challenges), and often the third or fourth language they spoke. It was a raucous experience, especially in elementary English grammar, where the bored fluent students played pranks and insulted their struggling classmates.



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At first, I tried to get the already competent students an academic exemption (so they would be granted the basic English requirement and could move on to a more rewarding course). That was unsuccessful. Then I tried to persuade them to stay away, assuring them that they would easily pass the final exam. But I was unable to waive the requirement for daily attendance. So ultimately, I split the class into two sections, spending most of my time with the village students, and meeting once a week with the other students in an informal discussion. I took attendance and we talked about the topics of the day. Every time, someone asked: “Sir, is it true that they have ‘love marriages’ in Canada?” When I answered “yes,” it brought down the house with laughter. Few could imagine such an absurdity. It became a ritual reward for good behaviour, as well as a pointed reminder of our cultural differences. I puzzled continually over the different expectations, hated the endless marking, and discovered that I loved to teach. I found appetite and reward in motivating learning, planning lessons, and finding ways to help individual learners grasp the materials and develop new skills. It was a terrific feeling to see someone “get it.” I also came to appreciate how difficult and enervating teaching can be. I gained considerable respect for those Indian colleagues who struggled against the culture of rote learning and the oppressive bureaucracy, another legacy of the British Raj. I bonded with many of my students, playing cricket on the university team, competing in the annual field day, and contributing to the college magazine. I accompanied rural students to their villages and heard their very different stories. One of my best students, Darcy de Meena, poured his heart out about the conflicts he experienced pursuing higher education while wrestling with the obligations he faced in his village – to his extended family, illiterate wife (to whom he had been married in infancy), and young child. There were many times I regretted not teaching political science. India’s legendary independence leader and prime minister,

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Jawaharlal Nehru, had died the previous year. His successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, sought to strengthen the Indian experiment with democratic socialism and maintain Nehru’s foreign policy of non-alignment with the Cold War power blocs. But with the Indo-Pakistan war, a crisis in rural agriculture, and language riots over the preference given to Hindi, other challenges consumed the government’s attention. In the fall, the ruling Congress Party held a convention in Jaipur, where these and other issues were debated in a huge tent just several hundred yards from where we lived. It would have been ideal for student discussions and assignments. Shastri died suddenly on a trip to Tashkent in January 1966. He was quickly replaced by Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter. Dwayne and I had the rare privilege of meeting Mrs. Gandhi on her very first official day as prime minister. It was the tradition that whenever the Indian prime minister was in Delhi, they spent the first hour of every day meeting people on the front lawn of the official residence. We tried our luck, and found ourselves near the front of the line. I had a number of questions to ask her but we had less than a minute. I remember her as extremely shy, very different from her subsequent image of uncompromising determination. She said she was happy to know that we were from Canada. In addition to teaching, I assisted my father in his work in adult education. The project had been begun by faculty from the Universities of Rajasthan and British Columbia a few years earlier. The idea was to jumpstart remedial and continuing professional education for adults across the state by opening up the colleges to evening courses, introducing correspondence courses, and training teachers to address the distinct needs of adult learners. We organized lectures, seminars, conferences, and short training courses, wrote and distributed various publications, and designed a continuing education centre. We enjoyed enthusiastic support from vice chancellor Mohan Singh Mehta, senior administrator



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L.R. Shah, and state education officials like Anil and Otima Bordia, two of the most eloquent advocates of public education I have ever met. Yet we encountered polite resistance from many of the college administrators whose cooperation was required. It was a reminder of another one of Professor Triantis’s lessons: just because progressive leaders in traditional societies like India pursue western-style development, not everyone in those societies is prepared to change. Although I struggled to recognize, let alone understand, the complex layers of Indian society, it was clear that many obstacles stood in the path of development. During that year, my mother helped establish a child care centre at the university and wrote two children’s books that were translated into Hindi. Classes at Maharajah’s College were scheduled six days a week, but given India’s unique approach to secularism – every religion’s sacred days and every state anniversary were officially recognized – there wasn’t a single week in the academic year without at least one day of cancelled classes. It was my first exposure to the celebrated Indian holidays now familiar in multi-cultural Canada. My favourite was the January-long kite festival in Rajasthan when young and old tried to manoeuvre their small paper kites around their rivals’ to cut their strings and send them careening into the wind. Our cook, Chuttan Khan, was the terror of the neighbourhood. He would stand on our roof, carefully glazing his kite-strings, with two or three kites on the go at any one time, while David and I cheered him on. The sky, and the nearby trees, lampposts, streets, and fields where the defeated had fallen, were a riot of shapes and colours. I used the holidays and the break between terms to explore Jaipur, its extraordinary palaces, museums, temples, and thriving handicraft industries. I loved its spectacular colours, the pinks, yellows, reds, and browns lit by a dazzling sun. I cycled everywhere.

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We used the Land Rover to travel as a family to other cities and sites in Rajasthan and nearby Uttar Pradesh, including the justly famed Taj Mahal and the equally beautiful abandoned Moghul town of Fatehpur Sikri. I travelled by train to other states to write about development projects and visit student leaders on behalf of CUS and CUSO volunteers. I toured the construction of a Canadian-funded nuclear power plant in Kota, where women and children did much of the excavation with head pans; a locally established prison literacy program in Bikaner; and Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram, where India’s first rural medical school was established. CUSO volunteers Jim and Sheila Ward sought to introduce more productive agricultural methods and family planning in eastern Rajasthan. Judy Pullen, whom I had first met as a U of T cheerleader at Varsity Stadium, helped the Dalai Lama’s entourage and Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala. Anne Groves developed a more culturally appropriate approach to physical education in the girls’ school where she taught in Madras (now Chennai). In her spare time, she studied Bharatanatyam, classical Indian dance, and became an internationally recognized performer and authority. Many volunteers struggled with primitive housing, inadequate nutrition, and impossible assignments in isolated villages. It was both daunting and inspiring. In January, I started running again. On the advice of Dr. Virgin, I proceeded slowly. I put aside any chance of defending my Six Miles title at the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. I made contact with the All-India Council of Sport in Delhi and the Rajasthan Sports Council in Jaipur, attended track and field competitions across the country, and lectured at the National Institute of Sport in Patiala. Up until independence, most Indians engaged in games, physical contests, and trials of strength quite outside cricket, rugby, and the other so-called international sports



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the British colonizers played in their garrisons and clubs and introduced to private schools. The maharajahs and the upper classes played polo and rural villagers played kabaddi, a marvellous team game of running and tackling. There were good sports programs conducted by the armed forces, the railways, and large industries. These produced India’s representatives in international competition, including its superb men’s field hockey teams, which won seven Olympic gold medals between 1928 and 1964. Overall, these programs touched only a small fraction of the population. In 1954, Prime Minister Nehru challenged the Indian Olympic Association to develop a national strategy. That led to the creation of the All-India Council, the state sports councils, and the National Institute of Sports (NIS) on the beautifully landscaped grounds of the palace of the Maharajah of Patiala. NIS functioned as both a national coaching school and a national training centre for several teams, including field hockey. I was particularly impressed with their efforts to provide athletes with better nutrition, no mean challenge in such an agriculturally poor nation, and to prepare coaches for work in rural areas. In Rajasthan, I travelled into several villages with one brave, charismatic coach, Mr. Francis, who sought to encourage young women to become involved in track and field. Only a few years previously, he told me, a father opposed to his daughter’s involvement had beaten him up. He and his colleagues persevered, focusing on schools where girls’ participation in public education was accepted as a contribution to India’s independence. They first won over female teachers and then the girls themselves. He proudly took me to a regional sports day in Ajmer where hundreds of girls in freshly pressed blouses and shorts took part. It was extremely moving. My most memorable experience came in Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab. I stopped there en route to Patiala to see the remarkable government buildings and urban grid realized a decade

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earlier by the French modernist architect Le Corbusier. Because of the recent Indian-Pakistan war, the buildings were closed to public access, surrounded by a two-metre wall of sandbags, with the entrance guarded by armed soldiers. Undaunted, I walked around the perimeter until I found an opening. No sooner was I inside than a soldier cross-checked me with his bayonetted rifle and physically escorted me from the grounds. It really hurt. Nursing my bruises and injured pride, I continued to walk around the perimeter. Some time later I came across a makeshift command centre where another group of soldiers was playing volleyball. I just stood and watched. About 15 minutes later, one of them invited me to play. After an enjoyable game, they invited me to tea. When they asked me about the purpose of my visit, I told them about my interest in the buildings. They gave me a guided tour. There is an international language of sport. I continue to follow Indian sport. The best programs depend upon state support, which, as in Canada, waxes and wanes in step with political agendas. The pursuit of medals increasingly takes priority over grassroots development, especially in the rural areas. The maharajahs and businessmen who control the Olympic sports simply refuse to accept reform, a barrier that continues to this day. Canada unwittingly contributed to the decline of Indian field hockey. The Indians had been masters of grass. No matter how bumpy and gouged the fields became in the course of play, they were such superb stick handlers that they were able to keep control. All that changed in 1976. Conscious of the toll that Montreal winters took on grass, the Olympic organizers introduced artificial turf, and the international federation made it mandatory. The much smoother water-based synthetic fields that resulted took the Indians’ advantage away and turned the game over to the larger, harder-hitting Europeans. In the build-up to the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi invested heavily in athlete preparation and



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created a national television network to show the results. Indian athletes came away with a record medal haul, twice the number from any previous games. But as Boria Majumdar and Nalin ­Mehta have argued, the net effect of national television has been to enable the spectacular growth of professional cricket at the expense of other sports.1 In 2010, the corruption-marred Commonwealth Games in Delhi was another tragically lost opportunity. Today, there are promising signs, especially in the drive to provide at least one physical educator and a good playing field for every school, and in the efforts of a few remarkably committed coaches, athletes, and administrators. But Indian sport is still a long way from realizing its full potential. Throughout my time in India, I kept up regularly with friends at the University of Toronto and CUS, while pondering the next stage in my life. Much of what was happening back in Canada seemed of little consequence. As a lifetime Globe and Mail reader, I had ordered a subscription, but by the time the papers arrived in Jaipur six weeks later, I threw them out unread. I did remain emotionally connected to U of T and Canadian sport, and I wrote frequently about what I thought should happen. While I was hoping for a job at CUS organizing sport, it became clear that I would have a limited mandate and even fewer resources. CUS wanted to retain the FISU franchise and coordinate Canadian competition in the World Student Games, but the executive was not prepared to take on the universities in the governance or organization of intercollegiate sports. I received offers of admission to graduate and law schools, but after the excitement of India, they seemed uninteresting. What did appeal to me was the opportunity that Tim Leishman of the Community Programs Division of the Ontario Department of ­Education had offered the previous year after I had given him a copy of my paper on government in sport. It would enable me to combine my interests in sport, political science, and adult education.

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I wrote asking whether the offer was still good and it was. I accepted, effective July 1. Following the end of the academic term at Maharajah’s College, I travelled with Anne Groves through northern India and Nepal, met up with my brother David in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and travelled home through Hong Kong (with a day excursion into China, just to say we were there). In Tokyo, I spent several days at the J­ apanese Olympic Committee, which wanted to ensure that Canada would compete in the World Student Games there in 1967. It was an affirming, rewarding return, and I saw again how vital sport and physical education were to Japan’s strategy of post-war economic and social development. My personal host, retired professor Take Aso, had travelled through Canada as part of Japan’s delegation to the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and we formed a lasting friendship. After several days of meetings and field trips, he took me hiking in Nikko National Park. When I returned to Toronto in late June, 1966, I felt I had double vision. On the one hand, when I walked along Bloor Street and caught up with friends and former teachers, it seemed that very little had changed. On the other, I saw everything through my Indian experience, and continually wondered whether I really understood what I was seeing. I asked myself why two societies, both deeply shaped by British imperialism, could be so different in opportunity and operations. Was I a different person on my return? I certainly had more confidence. Track had always whetted my appetite for travel and adventure and taught me to take the unexpected in stride. During the year away, I gained further confidence in my abilities to keep going and to succeed and learn from completely unexpected circumstances. I had also learned that sport was valued almost everywhere. It gave me a calling card to any part of the world.

10 RECREATION FOR ALL

My new employer, the Community Programs Branch of the Ontario Department of Education, pursued a heroic vision – public recreation for all. It sought to provide sports, physical fitness, adult education, and the arts for every citizen, regardless of age, ability, or background. While a previous generation imagined recreation as an antidote to youth delinquency and other social problems, the Branch espoused a much more empowering ambition – to unleash the full creative expression of every individual, adults as well as children and youth, to realize freedom for all. It felt that citizens should design such opportunities themselves through volunteer-led public agencies, believing that community discussions and collective decision making would strengthen democracy. That vision has long gone from public discourse, pushed aside by the neo-liberal attacks on government, the commercialization of leisure, and professionalization. But working to realize it in the 1960s was a heady experience. It became another episode in my education about the politics of Canadian sport. It’s hard to believe amid the frantic speedups and worsening inequalities of the 2020s, but many in the 1960s believed that the future would bring widely shared leisure. Automation would eliminate the necessity of work. Everyone would enjoy a generous

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standard of living. These aspirations originated in the spirit of community and the rise of social democracy that grew out of the Depression and the Second World War. To their advocates, they seemed quite doable. Almost three decades of technological change had transformed many forms of work, while steady economic growth, unionization, and high rates of taxation upon those with the highest incomes and wealth had brought about significant income redistribution. Most municipal recreation departments and many new facilities in Ontario were created in this period. The Branch provided grants and advice to municipal and First Nations recreation and adult education programs, trained volunteer leaders, and assisted amateur sports associations, “little” theatres, and choirs. Ontario support for amateur sport had an even longer history. It began after the First World War with the creation of the Ontario Athletic Commission by the Farmer-Labour government of E.C. Drury. The OAC legalized and regulated professional boxing and wrestling and taxed professional sports to make grants, build facilities for amateur sport, and teach every child to swim. Some of the revenue was used to build Canada’s first high-performance centre, the Ontario Athletic Camp on Lake Couchiching. (It’s now the Ontario Student Leadership Centre.) When the professional sports industry successfully lobbied to have the tax on its gate receipts discontinued after the Second World War, federal funds from the National Physical Fitness Act of 1943 enabled the programs to continue. When the federal government repealed the NPFA in 1954, Ontario stayed the course, paying the full cost itself. The dance with the federal government was repeated a few years later, when federal funding was resumed with Fitness and Amateur Sport grants in 1961, only to be withdrawn in 1970. Changes in governments and federal-provincial tensions still complicate provincial sport development, but a form of support continues to this day.



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The vision of public recreation for all was not without opponents. Conservatives worried about the penetration of government into a traditional sphere of private activity, and commercial operators resented the competition. Some on the left felt the priority should be public housing, health, and welfare. Many school boards felt that the visual, literary, and performing arts were “frills” not to be encouraged, and they were reluctant to engage in adult education. Although located in the provincial Department of Education, the Branch was kept at arm’s length from the formal school system and often marginalized in the budget process. Staff had to argue continually for their importance. I felt right at home in Community Programs. My parents held to its vision of public recreation and adult education, and I was comfortable with the culture of advocacy that came with the territory. I loved the idea of contributing to sport and recreation across the province. I was one of 12 district representatives responsible for advising municipal recreation departments and Indigenous band councils and administering their grants. My district included Simcoe and Victoria counties, and Ontario (now Durham) and York counties north of Highway 7. It meant long days in the car, as I tried to visit every municipality and reserve in my region. But it was a beautiful part of the province and I often stopped for a run or a swim. I also travelled to other districts, contributing to leadership development programs and hearing the dreams for expanded recreation of veterans like Bud Thomas, Frank Willard, and Ray Wittenberg. It was a tremendous opportunity to learn about other parts of Ontario, while applying the ideas I had developed in Rajasthan. I met with both elected and appointed municipal officials. I heard views ranging from the inspirational (the commitment to community development in Simcoe) to the patriarchal (in many towns, recreation simply meant boys’ hockey). It gave me a front seat to Ontario’s efforts to celebrate Canada’s Centennial.

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The landscape for public recreation and adult education was changing. Volunteer leadership was giving way to a culture of professionalism. The Branch encouraged the employment of full-time municipal recreation staff and conducted credentialling courses for directors and arena operators. Premier John Robarts and education minister Bill Davis accelerated these changes when they created the Ontario community college system in 1965, with Centennial College opening in 1966. Recreation leadership became one of the new system’s most widespread offerings, and many of my fellow field supervisors became department heads and faculty members. The new colleges greatly expanded the age cohort attending post-secondary education and created many new opportunities for adult and continuing education. I was unaware of it at the time, but Shirley Tillotson has observed that the new professionalization was framed to advantage men.1 Similar forces were underway in the arts with the establishment of the Ontario Arts Council in 1963 and degree programs in the visual and performing arts and arts administration in the community colleges. With the infectious spread of cultural nationalism in Quebec and English-speaking Canada, these various initiatives contributed significantly to the vibrant explosion of creative activity that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thousands of young men and women decided to pursue full-time careers in the arts. They undermined the focus on volunteerism that had been the traditional raison d’etre of the Branch. There was resistance to professionalism in amateur sports, however. The mantra in both Community Programs in Ontario and Fitness and Amateur Sport in Ottawa was that governments were merely “enablers,” providing advice, training, and funding but not direction to the responsible volunteers who governed, administered, coached, and officiated. Most people believed that athletic participation should remain strictly amateur. The idea was that government should enable the sports bodies to conduct their



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traditional programs more effectively, not try to change those programs. The National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport, led by volunteer sports officials such as Canadian Olympic Association president Jim Worrall, insisted upon such an approach. When the COA received half the cost of sending the team to the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, it apologized to the membership for receiving such a significant handout from government. As I worked more closely with sports bodies, I began to wonder whether they had the capacity. I was impatient to give Canadian athletes a much better chance to compete successfully in international competition, especially when other countries, notably the United States and the Soviet Union, repeatedly raised the bar. It was hard to see the volunteer bodies delivering on that. I also worried about the need to increase and broaden participation. The sports bodies had their hands full just dealing with their current membership; they had little interest or experience in reaching out to those not already involved. In fact, many were comfortable with the exclusive nature of participation. I loved Fred and respected the other volunteers who constituted the backbone of amateur sport in Canada. But I feared that they were over-extended and uninterested in change. In my first contribution to what later became a regular sports column for Canadian Dimension, in July of 1967, I wrote that “no matter how generously government supports it, amateur sport cannot be expanded or improved significantly unless the existing volunteer structures are changed.”2 As I pondered these issues, I returned to workouts with the East York Track Club. It felt like I’d never left. The club still exuded the confidence of being best in Canada. Then I attended the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, catching up with the families I knew from my previous time in Jamaica and many of my former distance competitors. The Commonwealth Games open with a message from the Queen that (in 1966) she placed in a jewel-encrusted, gold-plated

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baton. A relay of runners carries the baton through selected Commonwealth countries to the Opening Ceremony, where the Queen or another member of the Royal Family opens and reads it. (Seriously!) In 1966, I was chosen to receive the baton from the Queen at Buckingham Palace and to carry it on its first leg through downtown London to the Jamaican high commissioner. Brian Kilby and Bruce Tulloh, two other athletes from the 1962 Games, accompanied me. When we entered the relative quiet of Hyde Park and the police motorcycle escort sped ahead, we had a hilarious time trying to extract the message. We were not successful. In Kingston, the Canadian team had its best showing since the inaugural Games in Hamilton in 1930: virtually every competitor reached the finals of her or his event. India won eight medals, its best-ever showing. In the men’s distance events, it was clear that in the two years since Tokyo, the standard had improved even further. The African running revolution was well underway, and Kenyans Kipchoge Keino and Naftali Temu won the one, three, and six miles in record times. Ron Clarke, who told me that he had stepped up his training to three times a day, was the only other runner who came close. Before I could contemplate a return to competition, I had to get back in shape and establish a routine that would keep me from reinjuring myself. That I set out to do, carving out the time for at least one run a day while juggling my various responsibilities. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the start of my second, very different track and field career. Although I never made it back into international competition – I was never able to devote as much time to training as before, and the world was training even harder – I remained competitive within Canada, and found that I thoroughly enjoyed racing all the same. In this way, I continued to run and race, off and on, for the next 20 years. That year I became the associate secretary for sport for the Canadian Union of Students. While I was in India, the CUS executive



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had met with the executive of the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union. The two groups agreed to send the University of Manitoba men’s hockey team to the 1966 Winter FISU Games in Turin, Italy. They also agreed to meet again to resolve their differences so that Canada could send a strong team to the 1967 Universiade in Tokyo. CUS asked me to take over the file, and I agreed, on the conditions that I could pursue the broader issues that concerned me about Canadian university sports and do the job on a volunteer basis from Toronto. In the months that followed, I met regularly with CIAU secretary-treasurer Dan McLeod of Royal Military College and the other CIAU leaders. They wanted us to give them the FISU franchise. I said that we would consider it if they adopted the FISU eligibility criteria and agreed to student parity in decision making across university athletics. These were all major sticking points. In the first place, FISU held competitions for both women and men, while at the time the CIAU was male only. The men’s athletic directors were extremely reluctant to include women athletes. Dalt White, the men’s athletic director at the University of Toronto and subsequently a colleague in the School of Physical and Health Education, always said that I cheated him because when I asked him for money to send U of T students to the 1967 Games, I failed to mention that one of them was a woman, Abby Hoffman. Dalt never considered Abby, a four-time Olympian with two degrees from the university, a U of T athlete. Second, FISU insisted that athletes compete for the countries where they held citizenship, even if they had not studied there. That meant that if Canadian athletes on US scholarships were to compete, they had to do so as members of the Canadian team or not at all. The CIAU said no. It did not want to legitimize any Canadian athlete going to the US. Neither did I, but I had teammates like Ergas Leps, Harry Jerome, and Dave Steen studying in the US. I felt they deserved a chance to compete internationally in student sports.

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Third, FISU allowed athletes to compete up to two years after their graduation, which the CIAU opposed as well. Every meeting was a battle. The athletic directors felt that students had no business administering university sport. I felt we could do it better. My bottom line was that I could never recommend that CUS transfer the franchise until elected students comprised 50 per cent of the decision-making bodies across the country. I proposed that universities encourage student athletes to conduct annual evaluations for coaches, the way student governments were beginning to do for professors. We often shouted. Once Maury van Vliet, then dean of physical education and recreation at the University of Alberta, got so mad that he threatened to throw me out the window of the 18th-floor room where we were meeting in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. (A decade later, we became allies in the anti-apartheid campaign.) It was a stalemate. We refused to relinquish the FISU franchise and the CIAU refused to endorse our request for Fitness and Amateur Sport funds to support the Tokyo team. I found it infuriating. Every other Canadian team travelling abroad that year received federal support. I did agree to involve two athletic directors in the organization of the team, Bryce Taylor of York University as chef de mission and CIAU president Maurice Regimbal of Laurentian as associate chef de mission. To raise the necessary funds, I persuaded Prime Minister Pearson and the provincial premiers to serve as honorary patrons and pursued corporate donations and contributions from student unions and athletic departments across the country. But we got nothing from FAS. In the end, we were able to send 23 athletes in six sports – athletics, fencing, gymnastics, judo, swimming, and volleyball. Abby served as the official delegate to the FISU congress and won a silver medal in the 800 metres. David Bailey won a silver medal in the 1500 metres.



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Earlier that summer Dave became the first Canadian to break four minutes for the mile on Canadian soil in a thrilling assault on the record at Varsity Stadium orchestrated by Fred, Bryan Emery, and Bill Crothers. Dave had already run 3:59.1 in California, but the prize was doing it in Canada in Centennial year. Before the race, Fred kept it low-key, not revealing the plan to Dave, simply telling him that he should stay close to the leaders and try to run a hard last lap. Bryan took it out exactly on pace for the 880, then stepped off the track. Bill took over, brought it to the three-quarter-mile point just under three minutes, and then he, too, stepped off the track. I will never forget the expression on Dave’s face as he looked at Bill on the infield and realized that he was on his own and he had the chance. He put his head down and gritted it out, clocking 3:57.7. The following year, we sent the U of T men’s hockey team to the FISU Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, where they won bronze. But CUS began to unravel, torn by the politics of the student movement. Many campuses voted to leave. It ceased to operate in 1969. The Universiade scheduled for Lisbon that year was postponed, so the CUS sports program simply evaporated. FISU declared the franchise vacant. It was only on the initiative of Sport Canada that a large Canadian team was sent to the 1973 FISU Games in Moscow. It saw the Games as a testing ground for the Olympics in Montreal, paid 100 per cent of the costs, and controlled the selection. If not for Sport Canada, I’m not sure that the CIAU would ever have joined FISU. There was no student athlete involvement in decision making, and the program differed little from any other international games mission. Students lost a huge opportunity for leadership development as a result. In 1966, Community Programs seconded me to Fitness and Amateur Sport to contribute research and writing to the Hockey Study Committee of the National Advisory Council. It was another

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eye-opening opportunity. The Hockey Study Committee was formed by members of the Council who had extensive hockey backgrounds. They were deeply concerned about the state of Canada’s “national game,” especially the lack of success in international competition; the National Hockey League (NHL)’s stranglehold on the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA); and the barriers the professional system placed upon players who wished to continue their education. Bill L’Heureux (who chaired the committee) and John Meagher were deans of physical education at the Universities of Western Ontario (now Western) and New Brunswick respectively. They advocated science-based, educational sport. David Bauer was a Basilian priest who assembled a team of university students at the University of British Columbia to represent Canada at the 1964 Winter Olympics. He sought to demonstrate that top-level hockey and higher education could go hand in hand. It was the first such nationally selected “team-in-being” in any sport. Prior to that, Canada was represented in team sports by the club that had won the previous year’s amateur championship, supplemented by one or two outstanding players from other teams. In Innsbruck, Bauer’s team won the same number of games as Sweden and Czechoslovakia, which took silver and bronze respectively, but placed fourth on the basis of goal average. While this was considered a success, the question was how to continue with it. The NHL was bitterly opposed to the experiment, threatening players and coaches who even talked to Bauer. The other members of the committee were Bill Crothers, Calgary publisher Max Bell, and former CFL star and Ottawa judge Frank Dunlap. The research team was composed of Gaston Marcotte, Ron Watson, John Corbett, and me. My job was to assist L’Heureux with the coordination of the research and the production of the report. He and Father Bauer became valued mentors. I stayed in touch with them for many years.



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It was a good lesson in applied sport research. Growing up in the east end of Toronto, I had always known that in some way the best young players were “owned” by NHL teams so that they had little choice in how or where they would pursue a hockey career. I also knew from my conversations with Leafs players like Carl Brewer and Dick Duff how difficult it was for them to continue their education, and how managers harassed them when they tried. The hockey study committee exhaustively documented these practices and their damaging effects. We found that through sponsorship of a single junior team, an NHL franchise had the rights to every player in that team’s “chain,” right down to the house leagues in atom and peewee hockey. If you played hockey in Fredericton, you were the property of the Detroit Red Wings; in Winnipeg, the Boston Bruins. The CAHA executive sanctioned this system, and despite the strenuous objection of many of the provincial associations, socialized players into the professional game by imposing NHL rules of play. While on paper it was possible for a boy to seek a transfer to another “chain,” such freedom of choice was virtually impossible in practice: a team could find another rule to prevent the transfer. It was, as CAHA secretary-treasurer Gordon Juckes ruefully acknowledged, “the great Gold Coast of hockey,” a reference to the African slave trade based in Gold Coast (now Ghana). The hockey study committee condemned such forced apprenticeship and concluded that the CAHA completely lacked the autonomy necessary to govern the sport. The hockey study committee commissioned Alan King of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education to compare the academic achievements of male high school students who played junior hockey and those of their non-junior-hockey peers (which included students who played hockey and other sports for their school). The study was based on the province-wide standardized tests then conducted in Ontario. King found that the averages

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of both groups were about the same in Grade 9, after which the academic performances of the boys playing junior hockey progressively declined.3 It confirmed my belief that hockey players were just as smart as other students – I was never comfortable with the “Big Bobby Clobber” image popularized by comedian Dave Broadfoot – but increasingly lost opportunity. Given all the games they played, the bus miles they travelled, and the active discouragement they faced, keeping up with schoolwork was almost an impossible task. In three reports, the committee made 63 recommendations. It called on the government to break the NHL’s control over amateur hockey by amending the Combines Investigation Act to guarantee the CAHA “freedom from any kind of interference from the NHL or its agents.” It recommended that amateur players be allowed to play at any level without professional commitment, choose with whom they wanted to play if they turned professional (i.e., free agency at the beginning of their careers), and have unrestricted tryouts for the National Team. It also recommended major reforms for minor-age, school, and university hockey. A pan-Canadian conference of educational and amateur hockey leaders and an Alberta task force quickly endorsed the recommendations. Yet they were too radical for the Liberal government of the day. Prime Minister Pearson angrily told L’Heureux that Canadians supported the NHL and that his government did not intend to change the way hockey was organized. When the NHL expanded from six to 12 teams in 1967, it replaced the sponsorship system with a junior-age draft, but it continued to dictate to the CAHA and sabotage the National Team. In its final report, the committee concluded that little had changed and reiterated its major recommendations. It always bothered me that the federal government and the hockey establishment treated L’Heureux and Bauer so shabbily.



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L’Heureux’s activism cooled the Liberals considerably to the National Advisory Council. In 1968, when the newly elected Pierre Trudeau government undertook a major rethink of the system, it ignored the Council altogether, appointing the Harold Rea task force instead. I accepted an appointment to the Council hoping for the best, but it proved a huge disappointment. The government took us to beautiful places, like Manoir Richelieu in Malbaie, Quebec, but gave us nothing to do. I resigned. In the summer of 1967, Community Programs began to take on a greater role in sport development, led by a new director, Bob Secord. Bob had worked in municipal and provincial recreation ever since graduating from the University of Toronto in psychology in 1948, and had built up a network of colleagues and supporters across the province. He knew both the strengths and limitations of the volunteer-led system. With the support of education minister Bill Davis, he strategized that sports provided a much more promising terrain for financial support and legitimacy within the Ontario government than recreation. Like Davis, he had a shrewd sense of what small-town Ontario would accept and what it would resist. While unassuming and soft-spoken, he was relentless. Within two years, he transformed Community Programs into the Sport and Recreation Branch, and a few years later, into a prominent part of a new ministry entirely devoted to culture and recreation. Bob is justly remembered as the “father of the Ontario sports system.” He created the Ontario Summer and Winter Games, the Ontario Games for the Physically Disabled, the Ontario Senior Games, and much else, and he helped initiate what became the National Coaching Certification Program. We became lifelong collaborators. Community Programs’ vision of democratically planned public recreation for all has stayed with me all my life. But in 1967, I was not ready to devote myself entirely to its realization in Ontario. Instead, I accepted a scholarship to study continuing education

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at the University of Chicago, starting in the fall. After two years in the field, I was ready to learn what the theory and research had to say. The program was highly recommended by colleague Bev ­McCauley, who would go on to become president of Centennial College. One of my closest East York teammates, Doug Gilbert, was a journalist in Chicago, and I had always admired Ted Haydon, coach of the University of Chicago Track Club. I was confident that I would already have several networks when I arrived. The big surprise was that I would move there with a new wife, Varda Burstyn. We had met in a lineup to see Gordon Lightfoot at the Riverboat in Yorkville, and when we couldn’t get in, headed off into the evening together. Varda had been raised on a kibbutz in Israel and knew very little about Canada or sports, but we shared a political vision and had so much fun together that I asked her to accompany me to Chicago. We got married in mid-September, honeymooned at Expo 67 in Montreal, and drove west just in time for the first day of classes.

11 THE OLYMPIC PROJECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Coming from the exuberant, confident celebrations of Centennial and the taken-for-granted safety of Toronto, Varda and I found Chicago on edge with politics and fear. The violent US history of slavery, segregation, exploitation, and oppression and the war on Vietnam infected every conversation and relationship. We had both participated in raucous demonstrations in front of the US embassy in Toronto to protest American atrocities in the US South and in Vietnam, in solidarity with US civil rights and anti-war movements. But it was hard not to feel a step removed. In Chicago, in what we called “the belly of the beast,” we encountered the brutality, anger, and fears of racism and the US war machine first-hand. The City physically separated Black from white neighbourhoods with zoning bylaws and expressways. The poverty in Black neighbourhoods was visible. I had Black classmates, teammates, and friends who told harrowing stories of the open hatred they faced. In the summer of 1967, peaceful protests against racism ended in police brutality, riots, and burning ghettos in more than 100 US cities. Both white and Black friends were caught up in the politics of the war, worried about the draft. One teammate was distraught because his father (who paid his tuition) plotted bomb strikes in Vietnam from a computer room in St. Louis. Within a few weeks of

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our arrival, several of our new friends headed to Washington for an anti-war rally. I accompanied them to the bus. As they lined up and boarded, police officers openly took their photos and taunted them. It was chilling. We lived in Hyde Park, the leafy, middle-class neighbourhood that surrounds the University of Chicago. It was often said, variously attributed to Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Dick Gregory, that Hyde Park was “the only place in the world where Black and white stood shoulder to shoulder together … against the poor.” Muggings and shootings were an everyday fear. The day we arrived, Leon Despres, the popular alderman for the area, was shot in front of his office just down the block from our apartment. If you visited a friend in the evening, even if it was just across the street, you called as soon as you got home to assure them that you had returned safely; otherwise they called the police. In one of my very first races, a cross-country dual meet against the University of Wisconsin in nearby Washington Park, a white runner from Wisconsin went out of his way to elbow a Black teenager who was playing football near the course. Within seconds, several knives were thrown; one cut me in the shoulder and wrist, so I finished with blood dripping down my arm. It was the first time Varda had ever watched me run. It was another frightening reminder of the intense racial tensions. We received a warm welcome at the university and the University of Chicago Track Club (UCTC). The graduate school in education was liberal, research-focused, and experimental, in keeping with the spirit of its founder, John Dewey. Dewey believed that experience and democracy should shape education. Another much-discussed educational innovator was former president Robert Hutchins. Hutchins refashioned undergraduate education into an interdisciplinary curriculum of “great books” and took U of C out of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I sports. My classes were structured around the basics of



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educational theory and research. I learned a lot that stood me in good stead in my subsequent years in curriculum planning at the University of Toronto. Several courses required community research and volunteering. My most fascinating assignment was to assist two neighbourhood community health councils that had been established under US president Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). They were in poor, Black communities on the South Side. The Black community leaders sought to wrest policy from the paternalistic white doctors and other professionals who worked there. While well meaning, the professionals felt that the community volunteers had too little education and experience to be trusted with decisions. Every meeting was contentious. I’m not sure why I came to be respected by both sides – perhaps because I was a graduate student only there for a short time, perhaps because as a white Canadian I was clearly an outsider – but I became a go-between. My formal assignment was to conduct training sessions on how to run meetings, Robert’s rules of order, and so on. The community leaders quickly changed the agenda to focus on how to navigate the power structure and how volunteers could effectively direct the professional staff. The community health centres introduced me to Operation Breadbasket, dedicated to improving the economic conditions of urban Blacks. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established it in Atlanta in 1962. Jesse Jackson brought it to Chicago in 1966. Reverend Jackson was young, charismatic, and strategic. Operation Breadbasket held “Saturday Morning Meetings” in a nearby church to publicize and recruit supporters for its various campaigns. The meetings were electric, with a hand-clapping band, choral performances, and spellbinding talks by Reverend Jackson. Then we dispersed to leaflet and picket discriminatory businesses. A&P supermarkets in Black neighbourhoods, which rarely hired Blacks above stock-boy

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positions and sold inferior produce at higher prices, were a frequent target. After King’s assassination in April 1968, the weekly attendance grew to several thousand. Varda and I went virtually every Saturday and made sure to take relatives and friends visiting from Toronto. U of C was a hotbed of other politics as well. Varda attended meetings of an early women’s liberation circle, and later became involved with the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group anticipating that protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention would need local assistance. The University of Chicago Track Club was highly progressive too. On many US campuses, athletics constituted a reactionary counterforce to radical student politics. That was not the case in Chicago. The athletic department supported any athlete or coach who took part. The UCTC was even more liberal, pushing reform in the governance of the sport and athletes’ rights. Deeply intertwined with the adjacent Black community, it encouraged all manner of participation from fitness running to training for the Olympics. There were freewheeling discussions, which often moved to Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap across the street from the track after workouts. The club and its open spirit were the creation of coach Ted Haydon. Born in Saskatchewan, the son of one of the founders of the modern humanist movement, A. Eustace Haydon, Ted had been a social worker in the late 1940s, organizing South Side neighbourhoods alongside the legendary Saul Alinsky, when he suffered a heart attack. He took up running on the university track as rehabilitation and a few years later was offered the position of coach. “As a social worker, I ran around in circles all the time,” he liked to say. “Now I get points for it.” Ted ran the club as if it was a community organization. The membership was a diverse mix, with NCAA-eligible undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni, and members of the



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community, women as well as men, Blacks as well as whites. The facilities were open to anyone who wanted to join. Ted was one of the very few people at the university who had a respectful relationship with the Blackstone Rangers, the South Side’s powerful street gang, and he was often called upon to mediate in the community. I loved him. Soft-spoken, ruddy-faced, with naturally white hair and a big smile, he was revered in the sport. He served as a US coach at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. I made many friends in the club, including Al Carius, Frank Handelman, Lowell Paul, Ira Wool, and their partners. Al became the cross-country coach at North Central College in Illinois, where he has served for more than 50 years. Frank and Lowell are defence lawyers, and Ira was a professor of biochemistry at U of C. Ted planned an athlete’s workouts as much to fit in with their overall academic or professional activities as their racing ambitions, with the result that most workouts were short and fast. It took me quite a while to get used to his system. I missed the long intervals. Gradually I came up with a program that combined his approach and mine. But I continued to struggle with injuries. And the more I heard about the likely effects of the 2,240-metre altitude of Mexico City on distance runners, the less concerned I was about trying for the Olympics. In the course of my time in Chicago, I ran about a dozen races for UCTC and had some memorable experiences. I learned a lot about the Midwest, driving to meets through endless cornfields. It was through my old and new connections to the US track and field community that I became an open supporter of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. The OPHR was a Black athlete initiative to address racism in the US in the context of the civil rights movement. It was spearheaded by Harry Edwards, a discus thrower who taught sociology at San Jose State University, where the track team was known as “Speed City.” San Jose students like Tommie Smith and Lee Evans were lock-in members of the

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1968 US Olympic Team. Along with many other Black athletes, Edwards, Smith, and Evans were deeply aware of the realities and the challenges facing African Americans in the US. As prominent exemplars of their communities, they felt they should contribute in some way to the struggle for better conditions. They were painfully aware of the double standard they faced and the likelihood of reprisal for speaking out. I admired their courage and resolve. US Cold War propaganda claimed that because the professional and Olympic sports were integrated and Black athletes gave the US some of its most important Olympic victories, Black Americans were treated fairly, not only in sports but in housing, education, employment, and other spheres of society. Harry, Tommie, and Lee sought to disrupt that claim. I had heard similar concerns from Harry Jerome years earlier, and during that year in Chicago from Black runners like Harold Harris and the five-time US Olympian Willye White, who trained at UCTC. Track was a tightly knit sport and news travelled fast. One idea was to conduct a Black boycott of American teams competing in the Olympics and dual meets with the Soviet Union, in parallel with the emerging international boycott of sport in apartheid South Africa. Comedian and middle-distance runner Dick Gregory first proposed it in 1960 when he was a member of UCTC. I heard it directly from him when he performed at the Savarin Tavern in Toronto and we met after his set. (When my date ordered a Southern Comfort, he told her to get something else.) When he suggested it again in 1963, former Olympic track champion Mel Whitfield, who had often toured Africa as a US goodwill ambassador, publicly endorsed it. Although never taken up at the time, the idea of a boycott was widely discussed among Black athletes. It became public again in September 1967 when Tommie Smith told a reporter that some US Black athletes might boycott the forthcoming Olympic Games in Mexico City to protest racial injustice in America. His statement made headlines around



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the world. Smith held the world record for the 200 metres and was the overwhelming favourite for the gold medal in Mexico. One month later, after a meeting of Black athletes in Los Angeles, Edwards announced that the “Black men and women athletes … have unanimously voted to fully endorse and participate in a boycott of the Olympic Games in 1968.”1 They demanded the restoration of Muhammad Ali as world heavyweight champion, the expulsion of South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics, and the widespread hiring of Black coaches across US sports. They chose the term “human rights” for their group to signal the need to go beyond the limited legal gains of “civil rights.” In the weeks that followed, athletes, activists, political leaders, and the media endlessly discussed the plan. Some called Edwards, Smith, and Evans traitors, and the media tried to foment dissent among the athletes. I was frequently asked by the US and Canadian media for my point of view. I never thought twice about offering my opinion. The proposed boycott was the major issue of the time. I indicated that whatever they decided, I would support Edwards’s group. I said that while I would never encourage anyone to give up an opportunity to compete in the Olympics, a special experience, I well understood why they might do it. I could see the abysmal conditions Blacks encountered every day in Chicago. I was one of the few prominent white athletes who took such a position. On one occasion, I debated Rafer Johnson, the former Olympic decathlon champion, on Chicago television. Rafer opposed the boycott, while I supported it. As soon as the show had ended, a well-armed Black policeman, Renault Robinson, president of the African American Patrolman’s League, entered the studio, saying “Boy, you need protection.” He drove me home and kept in touch for the rest of the time we were in Chicago. In the end, only a few of the qualified athletes (most notably basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) stayed away from the Mexico Olympics. In sports where there were no professional

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options, most preferred to compete and protest at the same time. Their efforts are best known for the Black power salute of Smith (who won) and John Carlos (who placed third) on the victory podium of the men’s 200 metres, supported by the white second-place finisher in that race, Australian Peter Norman. Many other US Black athletes wore items of black clothing during their events and podium ceremonies to protest in less dramatic fashion. One-hundred-metre champion Wyomia Tyus raced in black shorts instead of the white ones the US team issued. The autocratic IOC president, Avery Brundage, immediately and arbitrarily expelled Smith and Carlos from the Games. Brundage first rose to power within the Olympic Movement by opposing the attempted US boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. The expulsion cost Smith and Carlos their opportunities to compete in their remaining events, a woeful violation of their rights as athletes. Norman was later punished in Australia. But no one within Canada tried to discipline me, and I was frequently invited by the Canadian media to defend the movement. During one awkward debate with Harry Jerome, who was reluctant to endorse it, I suddenly realized that some of the most outrageous examples of racism I was citing came from Harry. “Yes,” he replied quietly, “but I’m back at Oregon and don’t want to lose my scholarship.” The OPHR sought to expose every form of racism, what it called the direct affront and humiliation to the basic humanity of Black people in this society,2 but it had its most significant impact upon sport. The protest changed the culture of North American sport forever. Never again would athletes blindly accept institutional authority. Never again would the “representational status” of sports, the idea that athletes symbolically embody the schools, communities, and nations for whom they play, and the claim that “sports and politics do not mix” go critically unexamined. It set the stage for athletes’ activism ever since.



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Within days, Smith and Carlos’s example was taken up by protests against abusive and discriminatory behaviour and arbitrary decisions by coaches and officials across US campuses, on professional teams, and within the United States Olympic Committee, documented by an increasingly supportive media. There were 37 such “uprisings” by Black athletes on white campuses in the last four months of 1968 alone. Although the rate and nature of change differed significantly from institution to institution, many of the protesters’ proposed reforms were accepted as necessary to the survival of American sport and the institutions to which it gave prominence. Within a few years, most US colleges eliminated overt racism in their sports programs, began to improve the educational experiences of Black athletes, and initiated grassroots development programs for children in underserved communities, most of whom were Black. I have always been proud to have been associated with this movement. Sadly, as the ongoing violence against Black and Indigenous Peoples, refugees, LGBTQ, and other minorities makes painfully clear, there have been few further steps towards racial justice since that time. Many in US society worked systematically to roll back the breakthroughs brought about by the civil rights movement. In sport, most leadership positions remain in white hands. The economic policies and racist policing of the last few decades have so weakened and brutalized Black communities that many can no longer provide rewarding developmental opportunities for Black youth. Harry Edwards continues to expose the injustices and develop strategies to overcome them. He has been a professor of sociology at the University of California Berkeley, a counsellor to athletes and prison inmates, the director of recreation for the city of Oakland, and an advisor on diversity to professional teams. His heart is as big as his six-foot-eight-inch frame and his booming voice. He remains as thoughtful and incisive as he was in 1968.

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That winter, Canadian Press hired me to cover the Toronto Maple Leaf and Montreal Canadiens hockey games against the Chicago Blackhawks in Chicago. All I had to do was provide a game story of 300 words plus a dressing-room quote from the Canadian team. It was a different world. The beat reporters complained about how cheap the Blackhawks help-yourself delicatessen and beer spread was in the press box. They were used to the waitered sit-down dinners with linen tablecloths and fine silverware at the Cubs and White Sox games. But it was a feast for a poor graduate student. It was also a telling confirmation of the culture of “treats and threats,” the term that Carleton University sociologist Bruce McFarlane gave to such practices in his classic 1955 McGill thesis, “The Sociology of Sports Promotion,” on Montreal sports writers. That said, it was terrific hockey. The Canadiens, with ten future Hall of Famers, won the Cup that year, and I got to see them seven times over the course of the season and meet stars like Jean Beliveau and Henri Richard in the dressing room. We limited our time in Chicago to 12 months. It was difficult to leave. The university offered me a doctoral scholarship and we had many friends. There were many remarkable political leaders and movements from which to learn. But the pulls of Canada were too great. One of the appeals was the chance to effect change in Canadian sport. During the year, I helped Bob Secord initiate the Ontario Sports Federation, a cooperative approach to capacity building among the Ontario sports governing bodies, funded by Ontario and federal grants. The Federation provided shared administrative services and leadership development to the approximately 60 provincial sports bodies. It became a first big step towards the professionalization of provincial sports administration. With the charismatic Pierre Trudeau winning a majority in the 1968 federal election, it looked like significant changes in pan-Canadian sport were possible too. At a campaign stop in BC,



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Trudeau emphasized the social importance of the Olympics and amateur sports, saying that “sport is important for the image that Canadians have of themselves.” He promised a task force to recommend major changes.3 After the election, John Munro, the new minister of national health and welfare with responsibilities for sport, appointed a three-person task force to conduct a wide-ranging examination. It was headed up by retired Toronto oil executive Harold Rea, who had a long history of volunteering in the YMCA, and included Olympic skier Nancy Greene and Quebec sports physician Paul Des Ruisseaux. It seemed like an exciting time to be in Canada. Just before we left Chicago, I joined Varda in her work as a volunteer for the Medical Committee for Human Rights during the Democratic Convention. Just as the MCHR feared, the City of Chicago, led by the pro-war Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley, conducted an all-out assault on the thousands of young activists who travelled to Chicago to demonstrate against the war and support anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Many of them came with little money and sought to sleep overnight in parks or along the beach. The City made no provision to help them. To clear the parks, Daley ordered midnight raids, high-powered lights, armoured vehicles, tear gas, club-wielding police, and National Guardsmen. At the largest anti-war rally, in Grant Park along Chicago’s famed “Magnificent Mile,” swarms of police and National Guardsmen threw tear gas and charged the assembled protesters. The police department took their most experienced officers off duty and gave their youngest, most aggressive recruits the green light to hit as many people as they could. Many were seriously injured. It became known as the “Chicago Police Riot.” A subsequent investigation for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence concluded that there was “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. It was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no

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threat, including peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring.”4 In the midst of this, Varda managed an emergency medical centre/shelter in a north end church and stayed there throughout the night. I came straight from track practice to drive a station wagon to pick up the scared and injured and take them to the church and, in one case, a local hospital. It was mayhem. I’ve never been as frightened as the time I was charged by a phalanx of baton-wielding police in Lincoln Park before hurriedly stuffing protesters into the seats and driving off in the tear-gas-filled wagon. I learned that even privileged white university students were not immune from state violence when they opposed the political establishment. It was sobering to realize that Black communities face such police violence all the time. Several months later, Chicago police and the FBI murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton in his sleep. Alongside the City’s arrogant brutality, there were many poignant acts of courage and generosity. It was inspiring to see how well the students and volunteers of the Medical Committee for Human Rights had been prepared. Overall, we came away with a good feeling about Chicago and its activist traditions. I returned to a new job in Toronto, executive assistant to the secretary of the Ontario Treasury Board. The Treasury Board was responsible for determining provincial budgets and overall administrative policies. While I still wanted to work in some aspect of community development, education or sport, I felt that it would be beneficial to have experience working at the centre of government. In Community Programs, we had often felt at the whim of more senior decision makers and a distant consideration in budget making. At Treasury Board, I would see how it worked from the inside. The idea came from Steve Dupré, who encouraged me to apply. It was an exciting opportunity.

12 THE “CANADIAN SPORTS SYSTEM”

It was a surreal transition from the street protests of Chicago to the austere, blue-suited formality of the Treasury Board Secretariat on the top floor of the Frost Building overlooking Queen’s Park. The Treasury Board was a committee of Cabinet, chaired by the provincial treasurer. It met regularly throughout the year to approve spending and monitor the budget. The civil servants in the Secretariat, led by my boss Carl Brannan, scrutinized requests, gave policy advice, and tried to bring enlightened management and coordination to the vast provincial bureaucracy. Mr. Brannan – I­ always called him “Mr. Brannan” – was ­­ a career civil servant determined to make government more effective and efficient. He was open to new ideas, but a stickler for propriety, policy accountability, and financial responsibility. While I could never bring myself to wear a blue suit – ­I wore forest green and chocolate brown – ­I became comfortable as his confidential listening post, trouble shooter, and research assistant. He was a “small-c conservative” and I was a social democrat, but we shared a belief in government as an indispensable force for progressive change. It was an extraordinary opportunity to see how decisions were made (and not made) at the highest levels of government. I’ve believed ever since that anyone seeking to make change within

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complex organizations should spend some time at the centre to see how things work. In many ways, the “Red Tory” government of Premier John Robarts was a model of intervention. It relentlessly built sewers, highways, and schools to stimulate the economy and accommodate population growth. It seemed to start new social programs every year. In 1963, it created the Ontario Arts Council to pump money into the visual and performing arts. It 1965, it established the 21-institution community college system. In 1966, it accepted responsibility for Medicare. A few years later, my friend Cy Conick sat in the caucus of Ed Schreyer’s NDP government in Manitoba. When critics complained that “the socialists were going too far,” Cy could usually point out that the Conservatives in Ontario had already done it. In the three years 1966–9, Ontario spending grew by an average of 24.2 per cent per year. The seemingly unending growth of provincial expenditures did trouble Mr. Brannan. While the Ontario economy increased at the remarkable rate of 8 per cent those same three years, keeping tax revenues buoyant, the two curves were sharply diverging. Mr. Brannan had me plot them on white boards. He feared a grim future of runaway debt. He also felt that if government put programs in place too quickly, it was hard to avoid costly mistakes. While I continued to believe in activist government, I came to accept his cautions about hurried spending and his rules of thumb about financial accountability. It stood me in good stead when I became responsible for large budgets myself. Among many fascinating assignments, Mr. Brannan asked me to advise him on the implementation of the multi-volume report of the Royal Commission Inquiry into Civil Rights by Justice J.C. McRuer. I was well aware of the royal commission. It was prompted by the controversy that had erupted in the spring of 1964 when Attorney General Fred Cass tried to give further powers to the



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police. His proposed bill would enable them to hold anyone in jail for consecutive terms of up to eight days without a charge, a violation of the centuries-old right of habeas corpus. At the time, fellow student Jim Laxer and I had been so upset about the possibilities that we leafletted the St. George campus against the bill, led a small demonstration outside the provincial legislature, and stayed to listen. At the end of the dramatic debate, Premier Robarts read out Cass’s resignation. From where I sat in the public gallery above him, it looked like he was reading from a blank piece of paper. Shortly thereafter, he appointed McRuer to head up the inquiry. It was encouraging to read McRuer’s recommendations. In an age of rapid government growth, he argued that no public benefit should be denied or taken away without the suffering party having some right to appeal according to the principles of “natural justice.” He challenged the Ontario government (and public agencies like municipalities, universities, schools, and hospitals) to introduce, provide, and inform the public about appropriate mechanisms to ensure these rights in the thousands of decisions (such as welfare payments and university admissions) made virtually every day. The very existence of such mechanisms, he said, would have a corrective effect upon arbitrary or biased decisions. While implementation took years, the report led to a much fairer public service and an expectation of procedural fairness across society. I could immediately see its applicability to sports and took its approach to heart. I knew athletes who lost opportunities and benefits in ways that seemed unfair. I resolved to find a way to establish these protections in sports. My vantage point in the Treasury Board strengthened my belief that governments should play a much greater role in sports. It was an advantageous time for such advocacy. When the federal Task Force on Sport for Canadians, chaired by Harold Rea, asked

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for public submissions, the Globe and Mail asked me to set out my ideas in print. In a six-part series, published between November 19 and November 27, 1968, I outlined the history of government in ­Canadian sport, diagnosed the problems, and offered my solutions. I argued that the most serious challenges were structural – ­the bottlenecks created by volunteer administration, the restrictive amateur code, the isolation of many sectors of Canadian sport from developments internationally, and the woeful indifference of most Canadians to the state of sport development in Canada. My starting point was the view that I had been elaborating ever since my work in Community Programs: “amateur sport can no longer be administered on a volunteer, part-time basis. There is simply too much work to be done.” I called for the creation of regional and national sports administrative centres and the employment of full-time, professional staff, all paid by government. I called for athletes and coaches to be paid, with several conditions: financial support should be (1) based upon economic need, (2) broadly allocated so that it would help developing athletes as well as the stars, and (3) not so lavish as to encourage athletes to abandon their education. I was particularly concerned that financial aid not be tied to school and university attendance, i.e., “athletic scholarships,” but made available to all athletes regardless of their educational status. At the same time, I argued that financial assistance for university be available to all students, not just those with athletic ability. I proposed much greater Canadian engagement with international sport and public support for sport and recreation at all levels, concluding that the Canadian public had a choice – ­to support increased, proactive government investment or “stop bellyaching when we inevitably finish up the track.” The task force conducted a national survey and followed up with interviews across the country. When I met with Rea, I could see that he had copies of my articles with many sentences underlined.



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The Report on the Task Force of Sport for Canadians in 1969 was almost everything I had hoped for. Written by business consultant Chris Lang, Carleton University historian S.F. Wise, and former NDP MP Douglas Fisher, it called for government to move beyond its traditional role as an “enabler” and to take direct responsibility for strengthening Canadian sport. “Sport is too important, both objectively as a bringer of national benefits and subjectively, in the minds of the Canadian people, to be smuggled into politics merely as another phase of physical fitness,” it said. “Our political leaders, members of Parliament and senior officials must shed their diffidence about the involvement of government in sport and instead unhesitatingly and openly back it.” Among its 39 recommendations, the task force called for an end to strict amateurism, recommending grants-in-aid for athletes and coaches. It proposed the creation of new structures to address the problems in Canadian sport: Hockey Canada to manage Canadian teams in international competition, Sport Canada to strengthen the administration and development of elite competitive sports, and two new membership associations, one to strengthen coaching, the other sports medicine. Following the Hockey Study Committee, it recommended that the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association break its links with the NHL, with government funding and protection for players in school and university from professional drafts. It condemned the NHL’s “reserve clause.” To pay for these proposals, it recommended significant new federal spending and an end to the shared-cost agreements with the provincial governments. My only disagreement was that it called for an arm’s-length agency in the manner of the Canada Council for the Arts instead of the direct government department I preferred. As was its mandate, it had nothing to say about fitness, focusing entirely upon sport. As I was learning, the policy formulation process could be extremely complicated, with many twists and turns. So it was

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encouraging to know that my ideas had been heard. It was even more heartening to see the federal government actually take up these ideas and run. John Munro, the sports minister Trudeau appointed, and his senior advisor Lou Lefaive, were doers. They had little patience with the extreme caution that had characterized their predecessors. When they created Sport Canada as a division of the Department of National Health and Welfare, of which Munro was minister, I cheered. It meant that the federal government accepted full responsibility for the future direction of Canadian sport. Adrenalin for implementation came from the decision by the International Olympic Committee on May 12, 1970, to award the 1976 Olympics to Montreal. Most Canadian sports leaders and the federal government had been pulling for the simultaneous Vancouver-Garibaldi bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics, but Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau outmanoeuvred them and got the Games. For Canadians in the summer sports and the federal government, it meant that we had just six years to face the world on home territory. That, as much as anything, turned on the green light. Munro, Lefaive, and Sport Canada implemented the task force recommendations in short order. They shifted the focus to high-performance sport and pumped new money into programs. They created a slew of new state-funded organizations to address some of the perennial problems. These included the National Sport and Recreation Centre to house and provide services to the national sports organizations (NSOs); the Coaching Association of Canada to strengthen volunteer coaching; the Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine to improve the treatment of injured athletes; the Canadian Sports Awards and the Sport Information Bureau to affirm and publicize the best athletes and programs; and Hockey Canada to strengthen Canadian teams in international competition. It was a huge breakthrough. Sport Canada transformed the once decentralized, autonomous, volunteer, amateur, and self-financing



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governing bodies into a harmonized system of state-directed, -financed, -controlled, and -publicized NSOs, with a focus on improving the conditions for high-performance sports. It was no longer appropriate to call them “governing bodies” because they operated within policies and funding frameworks tightly controlled by Sport Canada. The multi-sport Amateur Athletic Union of Canada, once considered the “parliament of Canadian sport,” broke up into seven distinct NSOs. Previously, the national governing bodies were located wherever the president, usually a volunteer, lived; they ran them out of their own homes (the so-called “kitchen table” era of amateur sports administration) or rented nearby offices. With the creation of the National Sport and Recreation Centre, most NSOs and new organizations set up offices in Ottawa. The new money created hundreds of new jobs for executive directors, national coaches, national technical directors, and other staff, most of them in Ottawa. I had already helped Bob Secord introduce similar structures to Ontario. Other provinces and territories soon cloned the new federal ones to strengthen sport development in their jurisdictions and compete for the Canada Games Flag. The entire network quickly became known as “the Canadian sports system.” It became the prototype for similar programs across the Commonwealth. I have always found it difficult to criticize policies that I argued so passionately to create, but even in the early 1970s, it was clear that the sole focus on high performance came at a cost: the virtual abandonment of policies and programs that contributed to “sport for all” and the democratization of opportunity. While the original Fitness and Amateur Sport program pursued broadly based participation with the same enthusiasm as high-performance sport, after 1970 the “pursuit of the podium” and the “ideology of excellence” dominated everything. Fitness remained a rhetorical

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concern in the new regime, but the responsibility was hived off to a newly created social marketing agency, ParticipAction Canada, to goad Canadians into better shape. There was little money to provide the actual opportunities. It also troubled me that the primary justification for the new system quickly became pan-Canadian nationalism. I loved the fact that Canadian teams in international sports, drawn from all genders, classes, national groups, and regions, wearing the same red and white uniform and marching behind the same maple leaf flag, symbolized the best of Canada. I loved the narratives that individual athletes told about themselves, their communities, and what it meant to be Canadian. I had always tried to represent the best of Canada myself, and I still tear up during opening and medal ceremonies. But in the early 1970s, during the frantic build-up to Montreal, the various crises of national unity that divided the country, and the escalation of Cold War rivalries in sports, the long-standing association of amateur sport with nationalism hardened into the political argument for funding. Sports bodies and athletes endlessly espoused their nationalism in an effort to ensure funds. It usually worked with the Liberals. As Lefaive wryly observed, whenever there was a threat to Canadian unity or sovereignty, Sport Canada would propose a new sports program. When the US supertanker SS Manhattan steamed through the Northwest Passage in 1969, setting off alarm bells about Canadian control of the Arctic, he dusted off a long-dormant proposal for Arctic Winter Games and got the money. The nationalist mantra has meant a preoccupation with medals and “win at all costs” to the exclusion of the goals and measures of accessibility, cultural connection, and beneficial athletes’ experiences. I love seeing Canadian athletes perform well, but we should also focus on the number and quality of opportunities we provide as investments in a healthy, rewarding society.



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My personal experience of the creation of the Canadian sports system reflected these trade-offs. On the plus side, the infusion of state funds greatly expanded opportunity in track and field and other amateur sports. It financed coaching development, sport research, and the professionalization of administration. Once again I was training with Fred at the University of Toronto across the street from the Treasury Board. While I only had time to train sporadically, I got to the point where I qualified for the national championships in track and cross-country. The new money subsidized plane fares and accommodation, a welcome change from the days when I had to use my personal resources to get to championships. On the other hand, the new funding pushed all the attention to the top of the pyramid. To get money, an athlete had to run for the national or provincial team, wear a red “Canada” (or “Ontario”) singlet, and leave their club jersey at home. A small price to pay, perhaps, for the new funds and opportunities, but it diminished the importance of the volunteer-led clubs and sport development in schools and municipalities. The creation of the “Canadian sports system” legitimized and further encouraged the application I had begun of political economy to sports. With such significant government investment, it was harder for sports people to dismiss my involvement on the political side with the claim that “sports and politics do not mix” or for Treasury Board colleagues to say that sports were irrelevant. The new landscape quickly generated new opportunities. Ian Lumsden of York University invited me to contribute a chapter on hockey to a collection by a group of nationalist political scientists about Canada’s relationships to the United States, entitled “Close the 49th Parallel”: The Americanization of Canada (1970). NDP MP Ed Broadbent asked me to write a discussion paper on sports for the party’s 1969 convention. The federal Committee on Youth commissioned me to write a report (July 1970) on the attitudes of Canadian youth to sport and recreation. The widely distributed

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Weekend Magazine commissioned me to write several articles on “the Americanization of Canadian sport,” and Cy Gonick asked me to write a regular sports column for the socialist magazine Canadian Dimension. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, these invitations paved the way for the eventual teaching, research, and writing I would do at the University of Toronto on the political economy of sports. For a while, I continued to work at the Treasury Board with interest and satisfaction. I thought very seriously about making the civil service my life’s work. I helped Mr. Brannan create a multi-stage process to reform public administration in Ontario, headed up by the ten-person Committee on Government Productivity. Mr. Brannan wanted to avoid the fate of royal commissions, carried out by arm’s-length experts, because their reports were often ignored. He thus matched five businessmen with close ties to the Conservative Party with five senior civil servants. He felt that such a group would have a far better chance of seeing recommendations implemented than complete outsiders. While I didn’t stay to see it completed, Mr. Brannan and entrepreneur Jim Fleck, who became the project’s executive director and eventually the top senior civil servant in the province, made the formula of inside-outside quite effective. I filed it away for future use. But I was having much more fun outside the civil service than within. In 1969, I worked with Mavor Moore to establish public affairs programming in the Town Hall of the new St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto’s Centennial project. I seriously considered working there full-time. Varda and I contributed to Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz’s brief and unsuccessful attempt to purchase and manage a rock-and-roll concert hall. The Rockpile promoted musicians such as Lighthouse, Chuck Berry, BB King, and the Grateful Dead. Lorne was married to Varda’s cousin Roz Shuster. The deal fell



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apart during one wild, steamy Led Zeppelin concert when officers from Revenue Canada arrived to say that the group from whom we were trying to buy the club had never submitted the performers’ taxes that it withheld and tried to stop the concert. Led Z ­ eppelin refused to go on and started moving their equipment back into their rented truck. One of my EYTC teammates working as security quickly removed the distributor cap from their truck so they couldn’t drive away. While 4,000 fans inside and outside the building screamed and stomped for the concert to begin, Lorne talked Led Zeppelin into playing, and Revenue Canada into allowing it to go ahead. We were lucky to walk away with only a small financial loss. Lorne is a very funny person, but his genius is negotiation, and recruiting and coaching a team of very talented people to stage comedy and music with lights, sound, and other technical requirements. He went on to transform North American television with Saturday Night Live and many other successful shows. Eventually, I decided to leave the Treasury Board to seek a provincial nomination for the New Democratic Party. I was still committed to the democratic state as the driver of progressive social development. To this day, I regard the civil service as one of the highest callings in society. The disconnect between my staid work in Treasury Board and my outside interests was becoming too great. Many of my university friends were pursuing politics (although not all for the NDP) and I was envious. I was increasingly concerned about the extent of US dominance of so many spheres of Canadian society, while the federal and provincial governments seemed to encourage it. Although I had flirted with the Liberals at U of T, the NDP was my natural home. It became even more attractive with the emergence of a left nationalist caucus known as the “Waffle.” Of the many groups that grew out of the new left, it was the only one with a focus on Canada. Given my interest in education and community development and my experience with the provincial government,

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I felt I could contribute more at Queen’s Park than in Ottawa. Varda was working for Pollution Probe, a student-led environmental group at the University of Toronto, and most of their research and advocacy focused on the provincial government too. I respected Premier Robarts, Education Minister Davis, ­Treasurer Charles MacNaughton, and the other members of his government with whom I worked at Treasury Board. But they seemed to have little interest in challenging US domination of the Ontario economy. Robarts sensed my impatience. At evening meetings, after a few glasses of (very good) wine, he would take me aside, share his own frustrations, and then point out that most of the people supporting his government were opposed to any change. Davis teased me endlessly about athletic scholarships. MacNaughton invited me to run for the Conservatives. Likeable as they were, they seemed complacent. Although they gave me lots of room to speak out on sports, I felt I had something to say about many more issues. There was no place for that in the civil service. I resigned and threw my hat in the ring for the nomination in Beaches-Woodbine.

13 WAFFLERS AND JOCKRAKERS

What drove me into electoral politics was the ambition to enhance the collective self-direction of Canadian society. To do that, we had to address the crippling domination of the economy, education, the arts, communications, and sports by institutions and ideas based in the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1968, the federal Task Force on Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Investment (the Watkins report) documented that 75 per cent of the resource companies and 60 per cent of all manufacturing in Canada were owned by foreign companies. These were not abstract issues. When US branch plants exported raw materials without processing, invested little in Canadian research and development, and rarely competed against their parent corporations, they severely limited the related jobs and benefits to Canada. The CBC, the Toronto Star, and magazines like Maclean’s, Canadian Forum, and Canadian Dimension regularly documented the negatives. The Richard Nixon government accentuated these policies, increasing tariffs on manufactured goods while keeping unprocessed resources duty free. More money left the country in the form of repatriated profits than came in as foreign investment, and foreign corporations bought up Canadian companies with their Canadian profits. The US applied fiscal and economic policies to

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US branch plants operating in Canada even when they violated Canadian law. The most widely available books, magazines, films, and television programs came from the United States, as did the majority of recent hires in Canadian universities. As McGill economist Kari Levitt argued in her 1970 book Silent Surrender, it was time to regain control of our own destiny. Sports symbolized the problem. Ice hockey was the national winter sport (at least for men), revered as the “Canadian specific” and the “national game.” Yet it was ruthlessly controlled by a small cabal of capitalists known as the National Hockey League, most of whom lived in the United States, bought and sold Canadian boys and men without regard to their health, education, families, or communities, and shipped most of the best of them to the United States to ply their trades. The NHL’s “win at all costs” culture poisoned the game throughout the country. What self-respecting country forces its best young men to leave to make their careers, I worried. The NHL openly sabotaged the development of a competitive “National Team” to represent Canada in international competition. The Leafs and Canadiens acquiesced in these arrangements because they ensured marketing monopolies in English-speaking Canada and Quebec respectively. It was all legitimized by the public broadcaster on its so-called “Hockey Night in Canada.” The CBC never attempted to show the best Canadian hockey but only the NHL. It was not just “Americanization,” I came to believe, but capitalism, the buying and selling of sports and athletes, and the reduction of rich, vibrant communities to “markets.” In the allocation of franchises, the NHL shunned Canadian cities with storied hockey traditions in favour of the untried but more populous metropolises of California. I watched similar betrayals in other sports. The Canadian Football League repeatedly Americanized its rules, disadvantaging players who learned the game in Canada. In the Olympic sports,



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high school coaches, guidance counsellors, and the media encouraged the best athletes to leave Canada for athletic scholarships in the United States, with nary a word about how exploitative those “scholarships” could be. To be sure, Canadian sport, like other spheres of Canadian society, needed significant improvement. But how could we do that if we were uncritically satisfied to send our best off to the US? I saw no contradiction between Canadian nationalism and Olympic internationalism. While I continued to call for strengthened relations with sportspersons from other countries, I felt that we could not fully contribute as a shadow of the United States. The first urgent step was to strengthen “made-in-Canada” opportunities and institutions. While some change was occurring, it seemed inadequate to the challenges. It seemed logical to seek public office. I was convinced that there was a strong role for government. (“The state or the States,” as CBC founder Graham Spry once said.1) I had been inspired to contribute by exemplars like Tommy Douglas, René Lévesque, Mavor Moore, and Don Owen and teachers like Peter Russell, John Dales, and Steve Dupré. As an athlete, I had been nurtured and recognized as a national symbol. The media, service clubs, colleges, and universities regularly invited me to express my views about the nature of the pan-Canadian sports system. Peers and elders expected me to represent “Canadian youth.” Beaches-Woodbine was an NDP stronghold, so it was a contested nomination. The other candidate was Marion Bryden, the party’s director of research and an accomplished tax analyst. Her husband, Ken, had been an outstanding MPP in an adjoining riding. Both had worked for Tommy Douglas’s CCF government in Saskatchewan. I respected Marion. We stood shoulder to shoulder together during the October Crisis, when Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties in Quebec in response to the “apprehended insurrection” of the FLQ.

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The police threw hundreds of people in jail, almost all of whom were later released without charge. In Parliament, only the federal NDP objected. Trudeau’s actions enjoyed considerable support in English-speaking Canada, and many NDPers were ready to bolt. Marion and I worked hard to explain the importance of the federal caucus’s stance to the NDP membership. But we differed on many other issues, and she was much more interested in policy debates than community organizing. There was a clear young/old, left/right dynamic in the riding. After two months of door knocking and debates, I won the nomination by a vote of 228–113. Varda and I immediately moved to the riding (we were living in the Annex at the time) and I began canvassing street by street. With Lynne Browne, my astute campaign manager, we began to build a campaign team. At the same time, I joined the Waffle, the left nationalist caucus of the NDP. The name came from Gilles Endicott, one of its early members. When he called for public ownership during one meeting, he was accused of “waffling.” Gilles replied that if he was going to waffle, he’d rather waffle on the left than on the right. The name stuck and the entire group adopted it. At the provincial convention in October 1970, I was elected along with six other Wafflers to the provincial executive. By the late 1960s, the NDP had lost much of the grassroots excitement that had characterized its formation in 1961. The focus had become electing candidates and forming a government, even when it meant withdrawing from extra-parliamentary politics and avoiding political risk by swallowing its historic commitment to socialism. The Waffle sought to restore that energy and relevance. In addition to bringing the NDP back to socialism in the interests of regaining control over the Canadian economy, we sought to infuse it with the spirit and maximal ambition – “we want the world and we want it now” – of the 1960s youth movements. That meant policies on women’s liberation, the environment, housing,



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students’ and workers’ control, extra-parliamentary organizing, and regional disparities. We sometimes called ourselves “independentists” because we did not see Canada thriving at the expense of others. We openly supported the right of Quebeckers to self-determination (although we were silent on Canada’s colonial relationship to the Indigenous Peoples). Our efforts resonated with the tremendous outpouring of new cultural expression in English-speaking Canada in literature (Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje), painting (John Boyle, Greg Curnoe, Joyce Weiland), theatre (Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille), music (Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell), and much else. I had known Ontario leaders Jim Laxer and Mel Watkins ever since my student days at U of T. We soon made other fast friends including Kelly Crichton, Linda Hay, John Hutcheson, Jim ­Littleton, Krista Maeots, Kim Malcolmson, and John and Pat Smart. We met continually, at endless meetings, in each other’s houses, on picket lines, and at demonstrations. There was an exhilarating spirit to the Waffle, not unlike the closely knit camaraderie of track. It was one of the highlights of my life. At the 1971 federal convention in Ottawa, Jim ran second to David Lewis for the national leadership. But outside the small cohort around Jim and Mel, there were constant, increasingly bitter tensions. Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis was extremely wary and repeatedly diluted the policies we had won at the provincial convention. Others on the left continually sniped. Jim and Mel were astute leaders, but the attacks on the Waffle were hard to manage. Within Beaches-Woodbine, I was at pains to emphasize that I was running on the party platform, not as a Waffler. Even though many Waffle-initiated resolutions had been endorsed by the provincial convention, many veteran members of Beaches-Woodbine felt that the approved policies, especially those calling for the

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nationalization of the major resource industries, stiff penalties for polluters, abortion on demand, 24-hour day care, equal pay, and gender equality quotas, would turn away voters. When people were reluctant to criticize me, they attacked Varda, who was gaining recognition as an articulate feminist. During the federal convention, a prominent labour leader insulted her on national television and she responded by calling him a “male chauvinist pig.” The women’s auxiliary disowned her. When the election was called in the fall of 1971, there were open fights about the campaign literature in the committee rooms. The party had endorsed extending public financial support to Catholic schools to Grade 13, an anguishing, opportunistic move for many. Those who supported it feared that my position on abortion would wipe out any gains among Catholic voters. It was well known that I had advocated abortion on demand during an all-candidates’ meeting at Notre Dame Catholic High School and the mother superior had ordered me out of the building. I was unrepentant, though, and refused to withdraw the pamphlets in question. To support myself during this period, I increased my free-lance writing and consulting, and began teaching at U of T and York University. Once again, Steve Dupré was a life saver. One day in September 1970, he called to say that as the new chair of political economy at U of T, he had overlooked a requirement to supply an instructor for a course in public administration offered as part of the graduate program in public health in the then School of Hygiene. Given my recent experience with Treasury Board, could I teach it? When does it start, I asked? Tomorrow, he said. Nonetheless, I said yes. It turned out to be an exciting opportunity. Most of the “students” were seasoned doctors and dentists who were refocusing on public health. I was able to put my knowledge of adult learning theory into practice, drawing heavily upon their experience in lectures and seminars. I learned a ton, and from everything they told me, they did too.



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Steve renewed my appointment the following year, and hired me to teach political economy as part of two interdisciplinary courses on the environment. Both courses were team taught with biologist Henry Regier and demographer Chris Taylor. As a text, we used the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972), which predicted that economic growth could not continue because of resource depletion. It was extraordinary how much the three of us learned from each other and the students’ assignments. It brought home to me the value of interdisciplinary education and research for complex problems. At York, Bryce Taylor, the head of physical education and athletics, hired me to teach a first-year social science course on “sport and society.” I had worked closely with Bryce at Community Programs and on the World Student Games. With the liberalization of the curriculum and students’ freedom to choose their own courses, universities were scrambling to make courses more attractive. Bryce felt that something on sport would be popular among arts and science students. He was right. What was difficult was coming up with a reading list. At the time, apart from a few novels, very few books or articles addressed the social side of sports. Most came from the “jockrakers,” athletes and others highly critical of established sports, most from the US. (The term “jockraker” was an evocation of the earlier “muckrakers,” the generation of investigative journalists who exposed the ills and inequalities of the Gilded Age before the First World War.) They included Harry Edwards’s The Revolt of the Black Athlete, Jack Scott’s Athletics for Athletes, Paul Hoch’s Rip Off the Big Game, David Meggyssey’s Out of Their League, Laverne Barnes’s The Plastic Organism, and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. Between 1969 and 1973, more than 20 such books were published. I knew and corresponded with many of the authors, and was good friends with Jack Scott, who taught at the University of California Berkeley. Jack and his wife, Micki, directed the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society,

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which documented and coordinated athletes’ activism across the United States. Like activists from the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s liberation movements, the jockrakers called out sports for their racism, authoritarianism, and sexism. They also talked about the nature of the athletic experience as a determinant of equality. Sports should be educational and fun, Scott argued, but instead athletes were brutalized by their coaches, forced to take performance-enhancing drugs and play with serious injuries, in the interests of “win at all costs.” In high school and college, athletes had to cut their hair, drop out of classes that conflicted with practice, and even attack student protesters. I supplied many Canadian examples. Students at York contributed many more. Scott called for athlete involvement in decision making, and academic control over university athletic departments, demands I had taken to the CIAU. Meggyssey, who had played linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals of the National Football League, argued that “owners are obsolete.” Later, as a member of the NFL Players’ Association, he contributed to a bargaining strategy based on “we are the game.” The jockrakers drew strength from and supported the unionizing efforts of professional athletes and the eventually successful effort to overturn the reserve clause. They campaigned for Black hiring and women’s sports and against the appropriation of Indigenous names for sports teams. Scott called for a “jock liberation movement” that would transform both sport and society. My own contribution to the jockraker literature became The Death of Hockey, published in 1972. I wrote it in tandem with John Macfarlane, then the editor of Toronto Life. Despite the creation of Hockey Canada, the awarding of an NHL franchise to Vancouver, and the creation of the NHL Players’ Association, very little had changed. The NHL still exploited players and sabotaged the national team, and the federal government still deferred to it. While



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he was a member of the Hockey Canada board, Father Bauer was treated as a pariah. We began by extolling the importance of hockey to Canadian society. “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” we wrote, it is “the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter, we are alive.” Then we indicted the NHL and CAHA for a long list of ills – the exploitative buying and selling of youth, the unscientific development of athletic skill, the uncritical export of the game to the United States, and the celebration of goon violence and brutalized masculinity. We also slammed the mass media for its slavish coverage. We concluded by calling for a fully Canadian 24-team league, with franchises owned by cities or community associations in the fashion of the then Canadian Football League and the top Spanish soccer clubs, with democratic control and the elimination of private ownership from the sport. The book was an immediate sell-out and John and I spent the next few years debating our analysis and recommendations with NHL representatives all across the country. The jockrakers contributed to the embryonic application of the social sciences to the study of sport. The formulation Edwards, Scott, Hoch, and others used was that “sport is a mirror image of society.” Sport is racist, sexist, and militarist, they argued, because it reflects the racist, sexist, and militarist society in which it has been developed and takes place. This explanation gradually led me into academic sports studies. Just how does “society” shape sports, I began to ask? What are the best avenues for sports activists to bring about progressive change? “Sports studies” began in many places, alongside other new interdisciplinary fields such as “environmental studies,” “women’s studies,” “urban studies,” and “Canadian studies,” and led to new degree programs, peer-reviewed journals, and learned societies. The Universities of Waterloo and Alberta established graduate programs in leisure studies and sport history respectively in 1970.

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Alan Metcalfe at the University of Windsor founded the Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education that same year. The International Committee for the Sociology of Sport was established in 1966 and the North American Society of Sport History in 1972. As I discovered these developments, it strengthened my ambition to bring the lens of political economy to sport. After many false starts, the provincial election was called for October 21, 1971. The new Conservative premier was Bill Davis, for whom I had worked in Community Programs and Treasury Board. He had moved quickly to give his government a progressive, urban character by completely blocking a proposed – and bitterly contested – extension of an expressway right through the heart of downtown Toronto (the Spadina Expressway). It won him many inner-city votes. My Conservative opponent in Beaches-Woodbine was Alderman Thomas Wardle. He was nowhere as forward-thinking. A small businessman (he sold trophies and ribbons to schools), a staunch monarchist, and a petty ward-heeler of the old school (“Tommy would sit on a platform for three hours just for an introduction,” Reid Scott, the other Beaches alderman, told me), he was everything I was not. He had voted for the Scarborough Expressway, an extension of the Gardiner that would have destroyed 800 houses and beautiful ravine land in our riding alone, against which I campaigned. He opposed making city land available to house homeless youth, which I supported. There was no Liberal candidate until the last two weeks of the campaign, so it was essentially a two-way race. We blanketed the riding with the NDP’s vaunted full-press canvassing and signage, and I talked to voters 12 hours a day. I knew lots of people from the schools I attended, the teams I played on, and the jobs that I had had, so it was a rewarding experience. On Sundays I would set up a soapbox along the boardwalk, a



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suggestion of sportswriter Paul Rimstead and photographer Fred Ross, and draw significant crowds. We were very confident. The only troubling sign was that when voters came to the door, I could see the saturation Tory ads on television in the background. It was only in the last few days that we could sense the tide turning. Michele Landsberg, NDP leader Stephen Lewis’s partner, told me that the polling showed a Conservative victory. I didn’t believe her, but that’s what happened. Davis won a big majority. In Beaches-Woodbine, I got 40 per cent of the vote, a larger percentage than the NDPers who were elected in three-way races, but I had underestimated Tommy Wardle. He got 49 per cent of the vote. It was a grim disappointment, which once again forced me to rethink my plans for a career. Another casualty of the election was my marriage. Varda had supported me throughout the long campaign, but once it was over, gently told me that she no longer wanted to be married and intended to pursue a different political direction, much further to the left. We took a glorious holiday to Europe together and then parted. For the most part, it was amicable, but I was devastated. For much of the next year, I ran as hard as I could every morning along the lake just to burn off the hurt. I continued to receive emotional support from Jim, Krista, Mel, Kelly, the Smarts, and others in the inner group of the Waffle, but even there, it became emotionally difficult. The political infighting was brutal. Stephen Lewis, fearing that the Waffle presented a divisive image to the public, stepped up his criticisms. The heads of the two US-based “international” unions, Dennis McDermott of the United Auto Workers and Lynn Williams of the United Steelworkers, worried that our nationalism would encourage breakaway Canadian unions, openly sought to shut us down. In the spring of 1972, Stephen initiated a formal resolution calling for the Waffle to disband or be expelled from the party. Along with many others, I tried to mediate a compromise, but Stephen would not budge.

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The motion passed. Stephen has been an eloquent, lifelong advocate and organizer of humanitarian causes, but I have always been convinced that, by shutting the NDP off from the resurgence of Canadian cultural nationalism, he cost the party some of the very best minds of our generation. After our own bitterly contested convention, the Waffle set out to form a new political organization, the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada (MISC). That only encouraged the dissident factions. Some were nationalists opposed to socialism, others socialists opposed to the focus on Canada. Still others were would-be revolutionaries who argued that we should de-emphasize electoral politics for factory organizing to win a following within the industrial working class, the classic Marxist vanguard. These positions were sharpened by very different analyses of Canada and the world order, the role of the Canadian state, and the possibilities for social change. During our debates, speakers evoked the events of the 1968 “Prague Spring,” the 1968 student and worker uprisings in Paris, and the anti-colonial revolutions of the Global South. We thought we were standing at a crossroads in human history, with the entire future of the Canadian left at stake. With passions so high, meetings were tense and disorderly, with frequent personal attacks. I found it extremely difficult. We also faced agents provocateurs from the RCMP. We learned that afterwards with the publication of the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP (the McDonald Commission) in 1979. It seemed that the RCMP carried out “dirty tricks” on almost everyone on the left. In the early 1970s, someone connected to the RCMP broke into and burned down the U of T-owned house on Huron Street that several of my friends, including Stephen Clarkson, Abraham Rotstein, Howard Buchbinder, and Gerry Hunnius, used as an office for Praxis, the Research Institute for Social Change. I worked with them on a campaign to reform the United Way.



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In the fall of 1972, I turned to municipal politics, managing the successful aldermanic campaign of Dorothy Thomas. She ran as part of the loose, city-wide “reform” coalition that elected David Crombie as mayor. We campaigned against the Scarborough Expressway and for increased environmental controls and significant new investment in public housing. Many of the canvassers came from the NDP, but not all. I came to realize that there are progressive people in other parties, even corporations, and you should treat them with respect. MISC ran candidates in the 1974 federal election but did poorly. We disbanded soon afterwards. The Waffle put its stamp on Canadian feminism, the spirit of English Canadian cultural nationalism, and the debate on the foreign ownership of natural resources. I always thought that Pierre Trudeau’s Foreign Investment Review Agency and National Energy Policy were imitations of our efforts. But we made just too many mistakes. I quietly rejoined the NDP. Yet the Waffle shaped my thinking in ways that I retain to this day. It made me a socialist feminist, with the belief that to achieve full gender equity, we must not only change policy but transform the material conditions. It hardened my view that strong, democratic state institutions are necessary to protect Canadian interests and redistribute power and opportunity. Ever since the Waffle, I’ve pursued politics that recognize the self-determination of the nations within Canada, while trying to bring about respectful, mutually beneficial constitutional arrangements and dialogue. What I also took from this intense time was that while we should never pull our punches, we had to work much harder to connect with the people whose support we needed to make change, not just meet among ourselves to perfect a political line. During the provincial campaign, I met many well-meaning, intelligent NDPers who supported me, but who frequently said that they did not understand this policy or that, or that we were going too fast

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or that they felt distanced by our ideological jargon. I was so full of myself that I just barged ahead. Reflecting upon my loss, I tried to take two lessons to heart: “You can’t communicate enough,” and “No decisions about us without us.” I slowly learned that the singlemindedness of purpose required on the track does not always translate into successful politics. I was still determined to bring about social change and confront unequal power and injustice, but I realized that I felt much more comfortable working for those goals within mainstream organizations. One of those institutions I knew well was Canadian sport.

14 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SPORT

In 1971, I persuaded my riding association to submit a resolution to the NDP federal convention calling for the nationalization of the three Canadian franchises of the National Hockey League and the creation of a pan-Canadian professional league. On the eve of the convention, during the meeting of the committee that decided which resolutions would be presented for formal consideration, deputy leader David Lewis pulled me aside in an avuncular way and told me that “no serious political party can be caught dead with resolutions on sport.” He saw to it that the resolution never made it out of the committee. With a few important exceptions, the distaste among political leaders for serious discussion of sport and the reciprocal aversion of sport leaders towards the political process were widespread, and confronted me at every turn. I had political friends who sneered that I was wasting my time in sports and teammates who savaged my politics. They never failed to voice their disappointment when I left a late night caucus meeting in the interest of an early morning run or a track practice to attend a political meeting. Whenever I marched on a picket line in solidarity, Fred always let me know that “he saw me on the film” from his police colleagues. I felt pulled in very different directions.

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Track was my first love, so eventually I sat down with my closest friends in the Waffle and said that I needed to stay connected to sport. If they continued to rag me about it, I would eventually drop out. As it happened, they welcomed the discussion and asked me to help them get fit. Jim Laxer and John Smart became marathon runners, and Jim went on to become an accomplished masters hockey player. Others continued to ridicule my engagement in sport and politics. Those I knew on the revolutionary left sought to abolish sports altogether because of their repressive qualities. On the right, the most widely held view was that “sport and politics do not mix.” Prominent journalists called sport the “play pen of society” (Globe columnist Dick Beddoes) or the “toy department of human life” (US broadcaster Howard Cosell), implying that sports activism was pointless. Even among activists, there were doubts that sport could have a significant impact. The most popular formulation, “sport is a mirror image of society,” implied that the larger workings of society – in the economy, class and gender structures, and the systems of government – mechanically determined the nature of sports. The US union leader Lee Ballinger argued that if activists wanted to improve sports they first had to make changes to mainstream society. Ballinger was concerned about the decline of high school sports in the northern US states. He contended that the problem was plant closures that drastically reduced the tax revenues available to schools. He called upon sports activists to help unionize the southern US states, Mexico, and Asian countries to which production was being moved to discourage further capital flight. I was confident that we could transform sport and society. The Olympic Project for Human Rights had shown me that sport could lead change. The strikes and sit-ins inspired by Harry Edwards’s organizing and Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s “Black power” protest on the Olympic podium did bring an end to overt



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discrimination in many US college and professional teams. I believed that we could make sport more democratic, equitable, and humane in Canada as well. It was in this stage of my journey that I began to go beyond issue-based critique to a more comprehensive approach to the political economy of sports. I reorganized my “sport and society” course at York to focus on the economic and political structures that shape Canadian sports, renaming it “the political economy of sports.” It was the first course with such a title in North America. I expanded my network of activists who shared similar views. I held long discussions about the role of women in sports with Abby Hoffman and Marion Lay, who were preparing the ground for feminist policies within Canadian sports; corresponded with Harry Edwards, who had moved from San Jose to Berkeley; and visited Jack Scott, who had become athletic director at Oberlin College in Ohio. With Cy Gonick’s encouragement, I used my sports column in Canadian Dimension to take my ideas further. I spoke regularly about the political economy of sports at seminars and teach-ins in both Canada and the US and used those occasions to make further contacts. I tried to keep abreast of the developments in related fields, drawing upon the tradition of Canadian political economy established by Harold Innis, the communications theories of Marshall McLuhan, the cultural theories of British Marxists E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall, and the call for sport history by US social historian Eugen Weber. I quickly found kindred spirits in other Canadian universities. In particular, Alan Metcalfe at the University of Windsor, a historian, and sociologists Harvey Scott at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Rick Gruneau at Queen’s University in Kingston became close friends and allies. Alan was a fierce Geordie Marxist who carried out detailed studies of the class and social origins of the 19th-century Montrealers

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who created Canada’s first major sports organizations. Through his journal, Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education, graduate students, and impassioned interventions at conferences, he took Canadian sports history to a new level. Harvey, an iconoclastic former CFL lineman, loved to think up and try safer and more enjoyable alternative ways to play games like hockey. Rick, a former national team water skier who did his graduate work at the University of Massachusetts, was determined to create a distinctly Canadian sports sociology. Until he published his first collection in 1976, every textbook available for Canadian courses relied upon American authors with American examples. Rick was always organizing workshops and conferences on the topics of the day, and with Donald MacIntosh, Hart Cantelon, and Rob Beamish, turned Queen’s into a centre of sports studies. He quickly became the seminal voice of Canadian sports studies, with illuminating theoretical works and important empirical studies. I learn from him to this day. Between Alan, Rick, and Doug Gilbert in Montreal, I put a lot of mileage on the 401. Alan, Harvey, and Rick and their partners welcomed me into their homes, introduced me to their colleagues and graduate students, and encouraged my work. They encouraged me to think about forging a career in sports studies in a Canadian university. To develop a general theory of sports, I realized that I had to give much more thought to the ways in which sports were “society specific.” As I read more about the critical history of sports, I did a lot of unlearning. Through the German-English sociologist Norbert Elias and others, I learned that the modern Olympic Games created by Pierre de Coubertin were not the simple revival of the Olympics of ancient Greece, as Coubertin had always claimed, but a thoroughly modern event shaped by late 19th-century economic, political, and ideological conditions and upper-class western European ambitions. The differences between ancient and



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modern Games, Elias showed, were far more significant than the similarities. Others, such as the British sociologist Eric Dunning, extended materialist analysis to the origins of modern sports. I learned that, far from the universal activity common to all humanity, modern sports as we know them were fashioned out of earlier game forms in the elite private schools of mid-19th-century England as a form of upper-class masculinity training, in the context of intra-class conflict and industrialization. The railroad, steamship, telegraph, penny newspaper, and mass manufacture of equipment, in the context of globalization, enabled the development and acceptance of uniform rules and competitions involving participants from further and further afield. The diffusion of this British innovation around the world was a complex process that included emulation by like-minded elites in the white settler countries of Australia, Canada, and the United States, and imperialism, military conquest, and trade in the Global South. Such was the popularity of the new sports that those excluded – the working classes, women, Indigenous Peoples, and subjugated peoples in the colonies – fought to win opportunities for themselves, so the history has been full of conflict, too. It was about this time that I first read about the early efforts of the organized working class and the first-wave feminists, both excluded from Coubertin’s Olympics, to hold Olympic Games of their own. From Harvey and his U of A colleague Gerry Glassford, I learned that the Dene and Innu of northern Canada and traditional leaders in Africa and Asia resisted the attempt to impose “European” sport on their youth, much preferring the encouragement of their Indigenous games. This was a very different and much more tumultuous sports history than the benign chronological accounts of rules, institutions, and goal scorers I had devoured for many years. Sports, I realized, have been indelibly stamped with the dominant conditions and ideologies of their time. In fact, as I came to write a monograph

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on The Political Economy of Sport, I saw that the very possibilities, meanings, and distribution of opportunities are “intertwined with the production, reproduction and distribution of the conditions for human existence.” It forced me to think and teach about sports on a global scale. Do sports have any social agency of their own? I could not imagine how one could adequately explain the Canada I knew without some account of sport. There were just too many examples, I thought, of the ways sports influenced urban planning, transportation, investment and jobs, and patterns of everyday behaviour. It may well be that the social impact of sports is not as powerful as other social factors, but I felt that they played an important role. Drawing from the Marxian and Innisian theories of holistic and dialectical interaction and reaction, I concluded that the relationships between “sports and society” were asymmetrical but reciprocal. The trick was to understand how sports in their plurality and complexity are shaped by and shape other aspects of society. Another task was to understand how sports have been a site for social struggle over meaning and opportunity, especially for those historically marginalized or excluded. Rather than denying these efforts and tensions, I realized that they constituted the most important narrative in the long history of modern sports. If we accepted that sports were innocent of political and social power, I came to believe, we essentially abdicated the political meanings reinforced by sports to those already in control. I concluded that intervening in sports struggles was hardly a waste of time, but an urgent issue of fairness and democracy. I drew several important life lessons from these debates and deliberations. First, I became more energized than ever to make the study of sport in society a major focus of my life. Second, I renewed my determination to struggle within sport for the direction and quality of sporting opportunity. Given that



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I already had access to sports and something of a platform, I should take advantage of that in my efforts to make change. Third, as much as possible, I resolved to take social conditions into account in both my analysis and my interventions. Sports politics should not be conducted in isolation from progressive politics elsewhere. Sport activists needed to forge alliances with progressive people in other sectors. Fourth, as much as possible, I should try to educate athletes and other participants in the political economy of sport, and challenge them to take responsibility for the social consequences of their activity. I wondered whether I could find a job that would enable me to do this. Fortunately, the terrain was becoming favourable. As governments in Canada began to accept responsibility for sports, those who realized the social implications began calling upon governments to do more, especially with research. In 1970, Florence Bird in her Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women recommended that the provinces and territories (a) review their policies and practices to ensure that school programmes provide girls with equal opportunities with boys to participate in athletic and sports activities, and (b) establish policies and practices that will motivate and encourage girls to engage in athletic and sports activities. Fitness and Amateur Sport [initiate] a research project to (a) determine why fewer girls than boys participate in sports programmes at the school level and (b) recommend remedial action.

These recommendations, in the context of the growing activism by feminist sportswomen, stimulated new program development, research, and program evaluation for women in sport. In 1974, Olympians Petra Burka, Abby Hoffman, and Marion Lay

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organized, in Toronto, the first national conference on women in sports, which in turn encouraged new activism and research. Much the same happened in other areas, such as physical fitness and youth development. I contributed to these efforts. At the same time, in step with the emerging academic sport history and sport sociology, more universities and the new community colleges began offering courses about the social role of sports. As the government sports sector began to create new administrative jobs, universities began to develop courses and even programs to prepare people for those jobs. In 1973, I was invited to bring the political economy of sport course that I had been teaching at York to the undergraduate program in physical and health education at U of T and the recreation leadership program at Centennial College. The latter proved to be one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I ever had. There was lots of money for educational innovation in those years. Centennial teamed up with Seneca College to conduct the Mobile Intensive Learning Experience (MILE). In courses with Canadian content, the MILE took students and their instructors on buses (and sometimes boats and planes) across Canada to visit the people, cities, farms, mines, and factories they were studying. Literature courses interviewed Canadian novelists, poets, and visual artists in their homes and studios; labour relations courses met with employers and unions in their plants. One of the driving forces behind the MILE was my mother, Margaret Kidd. After she raised her five children, she went back to U of T to get a master’s degree in sociology, and then became a faculty member at Seneca. She loved introducing students to parts of Canada they had never heard of. I was paired with Chuck Gullickson, a former CFL lineman who taught recreation management at Centennial. Thirty-six students took our two courses together. Sometimes we travelled as a single bus, other days as part of a caravan that could be 18 buses



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long. Chuck and I gave our lectures on the bus. While we stayed in university residences where we could, we also slept on gym and arena floors. In Montreal, we met with Olympic officials and activists opposed to the Games. In Ottawa, we talked to staff in Sport Canada and the new national associations. We then wound our way across Canada all the way to Victoria, visiting sport and recreation leaders, programs, and facilities in company towns, rural townships, and major cities along the way. In Alberta, Harvey Scott helped us arrange a canoe trip down the North Saskatchewan River, from Rocky Mountain House to Edmonton. On Vancouver Island, we ran through the waves along Long Beach, Pacific Rim National Park. One highlight was interviewing Fred “Cyclone” Taylor, the most celebrated player in the early days of professional hockey. The previous year, Bobby Hull had jumped from the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks to the Winnipeg Jets of the new World Hockey Association for $1 million. The competition for players in the new league ended the exploitative salary structure of professional hockey forever. Cyclone told us about his own salary coup. In 1909, in the earliest years of professional hockey, he left the Ottawa Senators to sign with the Renfrew Creamery Kings for $5,250, three times his previous salary. It made him the highest-paid athlete in the world and raised salaries for everyone. He also told us a grim story in connection with his years as an immigration officer in Vancouver. In 1914, he had been the first official to board the Japanese ship Komagata Maru, which was docking in Vancouver. All but 24 of the 376 passengers, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab, all British subjects, were denied entry because of Canada’s racist laws. The ship was forced to sail back to India, where police killed 20 Sikhs as they left the boat. The trip reinforced my commitment to learn more about the political and economic determinants of sports across Canada. In every place we visited, people valued the sports they played and

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the athletes and teams for which they cheered. But the quality of their opportunities varied widely, as different jurisdictions and political traditions supported sports in very different ways. That, too, was important to understand. The change that most affected my future occurred in physical education faculties across North American universities. Traditionally they focused on teacher preparation, turning out the thousands of specialists needed to impart the knowledge and skills of health, hygiene, physical activity, and nutrition. Phys ed teachers taught K-12 and the first years of university in virtually every jurisdiction. They coached interscholastic and intercollegiate sports. In many communities, they were the most beloved teachers in the school. By the 1960s, however, as baby-boom-driven school expansion levelled off and institutions discontinued compulsory courses, the demand for phys ed teachers softened. At the same time, universities were becoming more research-intensive. Physical education never ranked high in the academic hierarchy – among many intellectuals, the subject’s focus on the body condemned it to scorn – and its lack of a clear research mandate put it at risk. In response, university department heads sought to make physical education more research-focused, shifting the priority from teacher preparation to the systematic study of human movement. The person most associated with this change was University of California Berkeley psychologist Franklin Henry. Henry called for the transformation of physical education from a profession into a new academic discipline. It would draw upon the already established disciplines in the biophysical, physical, and social sciences and humanities to further the understanding of the body in motion. In the 1970s, this approach gradually became known as kinesiology. The School of Physical and Health Education (SPHE) at the University of Toronto had long anticipated these new directions. It was the Commonwealth’s oldest degree program, established



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in 1940 out of the merger of two existing diploma programs. The first director was Stanley Ryerson, a grandson of Egerton Ryerson and assistant dean of medicine. Frustrated by the refusal of his colleagues in medicine to contemplate courses in physical activity as “preventive medicine,” Ryerson felt his only recourse was to move to the new school. He required students to take courses in anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and the liberal arts. He recruited faculty who conducted ambitious research. Harry Ebbs, who subsequently served two terms as director, had been conducting longitudinal studies of inner-city children’s health since the 1930s. As chair of the research committee of the National Advisory Council of Fitness and Amateur Sports in the 1960s, he helped establish exercise physiology research centres at four Canadian universities, including U of T. His successor, Juri Daniel, appointed director in 1972, made the full turn to physical education as an academic discipline. Juri is an insightful physical educator, researcher, and leader still going strong in his mid-90s. He was national swim champion in Estonia in the late 1930s, but his life was turned upside down by the invasions of the Second World War, first by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, then the returning Soviets. He only managed to escape to Germany at the end of the war. From there, he came to Canada as a refugee. I first met him in the early 1950s at the Broadview Y, where he taught me to swim while taking his degree in physical and health education at U of T. Upon graduation, he was hired as an instructor and swim coach. His teams won three national championships. In the 1960s, Harry Ebbs brought him into the faculty. At the time, there were no graduate programs in physical education or related fields in Canada. So every summer, Juri drove to the University of Illinois in southern Illinois to earn his master’s in exercise physiology and then his PhD in behavioural studies. His doctoral supervisor was Earle Zeigler, a

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strong advocate of physical education as an academic discipline. ­Zeigler later brought this approach to the University of Western Ontario. Juri needed little convincing. He had always believed that the study of the moving body required an understanding of the social and behavioural as well as the biophysical sciences. He set out to recruit and mentor a faculty that would exemplify that approach. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I became the beneficiary of the shift to the disciplinary approach and his leadership. In 1973, the School created a tenure-stream position for a social scientist and I applied. In my letter of application, I wrote: Even though it has not always been apparent to me, my prime interest has always been the better provision of opportunities for sport and play for Canadians … I want to devote my major energies to it. I would like to do so at a university, because I believe the university, having enjoyed better facilities, funds and staff than any other institution in the country[,] is in an excellent position to offer leadership, and particularly, to counter-balance the growing weight of government. My major academic interest is to acquire and impart a better understanding of the political, economic, and cultural forces and circumstances which account for the underdevelopment of Canadian sport and recreation.

I offered to teach and conduct research on related topics, including, in the context of the Montreal Olympics, the need and possibilities for Olympic reform. Although I didn’t have a PhD, I pointed to my extensive publications, university-level teaching, and amateur sport and government administrative experience. I won the job. I met my first students as a full-time faculty member in early September 1973. I was assigned to assist with the School’s outdoor



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education program, conducted during the week before classes by Professor Kirk Wipper at Camp Kandalore in Haliburton. Kirk made his life’s work the collection and documentation of canoes and kayaks from across North America, and used them to examine how different Indigenous and settler cultures adapted to different watersheds. Eventually his collection became the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. Kirk would sometimes pop into your office excitedly and ask you to teach his class. He had just heard about a watercraft he needed for the collection and had to drive there immediately to pick it up lest some other museum grab it. His truck had permanent canoe racks. I could never turn him down. Kirk designed the outdoor projects to teach students how to enjoy physical activity in the natural environment whatever the conditions. “There’s no such thing as bad weather,” he would say, “only different.” The outdoor projects also enabled pre-term orientation, bonding, and leadership development. In that very first year, Kirk asked me to take 25 third-year students on a five-day backpack. I decided to make it a political field trip. One issue for Canadian nationalists that summer was American ownership of Canadian resorts and recreation land. One target of media stories was Longford Township in Muskoka. Twelve Cleveland-based families owned the entire township. They hired guards to turn away visitors, claiming that they were conserving it for future generations. My plan was to skirt the road, quietly walk through the township, and look for ourselves, while engaging students in the issues of foreign ownership, access to recreation land, and environmental protection. The political discussions went very well. I found the students extremely knowledgeable and socially progressive, with buoyant, infectious energy. But despite wonderful weather, it was a wet slog. We had topographical maps and compasses but what I did not

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anticipate was the extremely high water level created by an abundance of beaver dams. After day three, I began to realize that we were not going to make it in five days. Everyone had wet socks and boots. I feared angry complaints about the extended trip. Many students were backpacking and camping for the very first time. Yet when I briefed them on our situation, they just broke out into song: “When you’re happy and you know it …” After almost a decade looking for clear purpose, I had found a welcome home.

15 DREAM JOB

I told friends and family that I would try the School of Physical and Health Education (SPHE) for a few years and probably move on. I knew I wanted to teach and write about the political economy of sports, but I was unsure about physical education. I half-believed the stereotype that the field was anti-intellectual, narrowly focused on the mechanics and motivations of human performance. At times, I did feel out of place. Colleagues remember me in those early years as critical of almost everything. “Bruce comes to meetings late, gives us shit, and then leaves” is the way one put it. It turned out to be my dream job. Under Juri Daniel, the School set out to study every aspect of the active, moving human body in all its complexities – ­its history; its social and economic impact, its representation in philosophy, dance, and the arts; its physiology and biochemistry; and its implications for physical and mental health. The intellectual ambition was almost as broad as that of the university itself. I had been thinking, reading, and collecting documents about Canadian and international sport for as long as I could remember. The School gave me the opportunity to develop a body of knowledge, teach a series of courses on those very subjects, and challenge students to take a critical interest in the societal implications of sports.

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Getting to know the students was one of the attractions. Although phys ed students had the reputation of being academically weak, loud, and disruptive, I found them as intellectually curious and capable as the arts and science students I had previously taught, just with different experiences and career aspirations. As long as I did not require them to wade through abstract theory, I could get them to read critically and engage in research. Many were deeply involved in the sports system, so I could easily engage their interest. I learned a great deal from them. The inspiration for the book I did with Mary Eberts, Athletes’ Rights in Canada, came from Olympic swimmer Dan Thompson when he was a student. He told me angrily that two of his national teammates, who had missed a curfew in Berlin by 30 minutes, were sent home arbitrarily without the chance to swim their races. It cost Dan the chance to swim a relay. Preventing a repeat of that injustice became the starting point for our study. The expectation for published research encouraged me to write more systematically, and strengthen my links to the emerging networks of sport scholarship. SPHE gave me a legitimate platform for my various attempts to reform sport and recreation. Juri always supported my ambition to intervene and ran interference when I ruffled feathers. While the School was moving towards a research focus, framed by the basic disciplines, it retained its status as one of the university’s 15 professional schools. Professional schools were expected to contribute research and teaching to the improvement of understanding and practice in the various fields graduates entered. In SPHE’s case, that was school-based physical and health education, physical fitness, public recreation, and organized sports. Senior colleagues had long been exemplars of such leadership. Harry Ebbs was a pioneer in child health, Kirk Wipper in the camping movement, and Juri in the development of senior fitness programs. Earlier in his career, Juri had organized youth programs in the inner-city University Settlement.



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Another bonus was the opportunity to teach and coach track and field with my good friend Andy Higgins. In those days, every faculty member in physical education was required to teach at least one physical activity course. In addition to my “academic subjects,” I was assigned three courses in track and field. Two years earlier, U of T appointed Andy track coach when Fred Foot decided to retire (the first of many such occasions). The two of us decided to integrate the East York Track Club with the intercollegiate team to form the University of Toronto Track Club. We modelled it on the University of Chicago Track Club where I had run as a graduate student. Andy was a gifted, charismatic teacher, who went on to become a national coach in the combined events and a leader in coach education. He sought to awaken the physical pleasures of movement in his students and athletes as much as strengthen the technique and skill that would enable them to perform successfully. His favourite saying was “If you miss the joy of it, you miss it all.” I became a much better teacher alongside him. Andy was an exemplar of student-centred learning. He made me much more aware of the very different ways students learned, both cognitively and physically, and the different ways to help them. Teaching in a sweat suit strengthened my rapport with students. I also learned tremendously from two talented refugees from eastern Europe Andy recruited. Zoltan Tenke and Bogdan Poprawski had been national coaches in Hungary and Poland respectively, and brought a wealth of knowledge about training in the Soviet sports system. We sat around the track endlessly comparing notes. Since U of T did not have an indoor facility, the track and field teaching was concentrated into the first six weeks of the fall term. In those years, intercollegiate track was an early fall sport as well. It was a beautiful time of the year to teach outside in Varsity Stadium and Riverdale and High Parks, and to take students around Ontario and the US Great Lake states for meets.

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SPHE gave me a chance to train and race without anyone wondering scornfully, “Bruce, are you still running?!” I had sharply reduced my activity during my attempt at public office but now I could run every day. I often trained with the outstanding next generation of U of T distance runners, including Mike Dyon, Steve Findlay, Brad Morley, Peter Pimm, Joe Sax, John Sharp, and Paul Williams, and a group of veterans that included Jack Friel, Roz Fulwell, Dominik Machek, and John Reeves. I ran without a care in the world. I didn’t win many races, but I was competitive every time. In many ways, they were my happiest years in track and field. It was an exciting time to be at the University of Toronto. Different people have always experienced U of T in different ways. Some experience it as crowded and impersonal, insular and hierarchal. It can be all of that. But it can also be extraordinarily stimulating, energized by vibrant micro-communities, the clash of ideas, and a commitment to social change. That’s how it was for me. The spirit of the 1960s had unleashed a wave of educational innovation and optimism. Students were curious, confident, and open to change. They had few worries about employment after three decades of steady economic growth and, because tuition was low, carried very little debt. The liberalization of the curriculum enabled the development of new, interdisciplinary fields of study, notably women’s, environmental, urban, and Canadian studies, and strong links to outside communities. Mel Watkins recruited me to Canadian Studies in University College. SPHE was then located at 104 St. Joseph Street, the site of the original Ontario Research Foundation established in 1928. My office was a chemically reeking, asbestos-laden former lab. Mel took one sniff and found me another office and a cross-appointment to Canadian Studies in UC, my undergraduate college and the most beautiful building in Toronto. UC was a warm, vibrant, progressive intellectual community, and Mel, Bill Blissett, Michael Finlayson, Bill Keith, Ann Lancashire, Jack McLeod, David Rayside,



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Peter Richardson, Carol Robb, June Surgey, Douglas Thomson, Archie Thornton, and many others quickly drew me into their conversations and projects. The mood across campus was not entirely buoyant, however. The first of what became a long series of cutbacks in provincial funding began to hit. Departments had to freeze hiring and lay off part-time faculty. Canadianists feared that with many of the newer faculty appointed from the US, there was little commitment to research and teaching about Canada’s distinct issues. Morale was particularly low among those senior colleagues who concerned themselves with the direction of the university. Faculty interests had been sidelined in the creation of a new, integrated Governing Council in 1971. Previously a faculty-dominated Senate was responsible for academic matters while the business-dominated Board of Governors handled finances, capital projects, and relations with the province. Instead of playing the long-hoped-for leading role in the new body, faculty became one estate trading elbows with students, staff, alumni, and provincial appointees. The effect was to strengthen power in the hands of the university administration. Another concern was the lack of an effective mechanism for collective bargaining for salaries, benefits, and working conditions at a time when double-digit inflation was eroding the standard of living. Many colleagues, especially in the sciences and professions, opposed the unionization that took place at other Canadian universities. The University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) essentially had to accept whatever the administration offered. I joined the faculty association and became SPHE representative on the UTFA Council. While I would have preferred full certification, I supported the successful negotiation of a Memorandum of Agreement that gave the faculty all the benefits of collective bargaining without unionization. I learned a great deal about the financial policy of the university through UTFA, and developed

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friendships there that stood me in good stead throughout my career. I gained another entry into university politics when Juri assigned me to a major reorganization of athletics that began within a few months of my appointment. He seconded me to Vice President Jill Ker Conway to contribute to the necessary staff work, and eventually to the design and construction of new athletic and physical education facilities on the St. George campus. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. As an undergraduate, I had always wanted to affect the course of U of T athletics but made very little headway. Now I was directed to help. Jill was an inspiring mentor. A brilliant historian and no-nonsense administrator, she was determined to modernize U of T athletics and make it equitable for women. She quickly won the support of the new university president, John Evans, a former captain of the football team. I shared the work with Jack Dimond, a veteran of the student housing movement and a doctoral student in philosophy wise beyond his years. He would go on to become the secretary of the Governing Council. Jill encouraged me to play a leadership role. To do so, she said, I had to bury the hatchet with the old guard, tone down my rhetoric, and accept incremental change. It was similar to the lessons Carl Brannan had tried to teach me, but this time, I took the lessons to heart. Whereas, previously, I prided myself on sharpening the edges, I gradually learned to soften them in the interests of bringing people together. I came to see that in an institution where people worked together for years, where a snub could nurse a grudge for decades, respectful relationships were essential to getting things done. I eventually came to realize that whatever the agenda, the most important goal of every meeting should be to strengthen the personal relationships involved. While it’s hard to win a friend in a crisis, if you have forged those relationships, they will come through in difficult times.



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I returned the favour with a pair of running shoes. Jill became a runner for the rest of her life, an enthusiastic advocate of physical fitness. Reshaping athletics would be no easy task. While the university had changed a great deal in the eight years since I had graduated, very little had changed in athletics. It was still divided into two gender-based solitudes, both of which struggled for identity and purpose amid the transformations of the student body and changing ideas towards sports and physical activity. The administrative arrangements were baffling, even to insiders. Both men’s and women’s programs were divided into university-financed departments, which once conducted compulsory physical education programs for first- and second-year students, and student-funded athletic associations, which organized intercollegiate sports. Any logic to the original division of labour disappeared in the 1960s, when the university abolished compulsory physical education in the face of the liberalization of the curriculum and the crush of student numbers upon facilities. There was further overlap with Hart House and the suburban colleges in Scarborough and Mississauga. Athletic facilities were another sorry picture. The men’s had not changed significantly since Hart House opened in 1919 when there were 3,000 students. In 1973, enrolment was 22,500. When planning for the baby boom began in the 1950s, a committee recommended two new athletic fields and a new men’s athletic building. Alumni contributed generously, but the Board of Governors rejected the idea of new fields and made the men’s athletic building a low priority. The money was notionally saved for athletics and invested in other buildings. Attempts in the 1960s and early 1970s to get a new building off the ground came to naught. Many on the men’s side, especially athletic director Dalt White, feared that with the growing emphasis upon research and graduate education, the university had forgotten about athletics altogether.

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The women’s facilities were somewhat better, although an ongoing source of resentment. When Hart House was opened as a male sanctuary in 1919, the university promised women their own building. It took another hard-fought 40 years for the women to wring their own facility from the reluctant administration. That was the Benson Building, opened in 1959 and named after Clara Benson, one of the first women ever to receive a PhD at U of T and a long-time supporter of women’s athletics. In view of the history, the women insisted that the Benson Building be reserved entirely for them. The men’s appeal to use the spacious and well-equipped sports court for their intercollegiate games was rejected out of hand. To add to this woeful story, SPHE was underfunded and needed modern laboratories and offices. Like many of the other professional faculties, it was a “stone soup” operation, cobbled together with a small full-time faculty, basic teaching from the Faculties of Arts and Science and Medicine, and physical activity instruction from the athletic departments and associations. Its facilities were spread all across the St. George campus. Football and hockey still monopolized men’s athletics. The leadership put their hopes on a return to the glory days of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when the football Blues outdrew the Argos, playing to near-capacity crowds in the 27,000-seat Varsity Stadium, it was standing room only for men’s hockey at Varsity Arena, and Varsity sports received daily coverage in the Toronto media. The teams were athletically better in the 1970s, but students, faculty, alumni, and the sporting public were less and less interested. The crowds grew smaller year after year, and the media, too, gradually departed. The determinations were complex. The 1960s counter-culture scorned rah-rah spectator sports, and the student body was much more diverse than the tightly knit Christian communities that made intercollegiate sports a focal point of student life in earlier years. Toronto had changed too. In the heyday of Varsity Stadium, there was little else to do on the weekend. Sunday was completely



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shut down by Sabbatarian laws. By the 1960s, jazz and folk clubs, experimental theatre, commercial art galleries, good restaurants, and an increasingly cosmopolitan cinema offered students, alumni, and members of the public many more entertainment possibilities. The Sunday laws were systematically relaxed. The Argos and the Leafs got much better at promotion and strengthened their relationships with the mass media, creating what scholars now call the “sports media complex,” gradually shutting out coverage and awareness of university (and high school) sports. The same pattern played out in virtually every major North American city. With few exceptions, the well-attended events that most people associate with college athletics only take place in small and medium-size towns without a major professional league. Jill and I still saw a place for athletics. We just thought that they had to become much more relevant to the changing times. We decided to articulate new overall objectives for the degree program in physical and health education and the extra-curricular programs in athletics and recreation, and use those objectives to reorganize athletics and plan new facilities. She asked me to draft them. As I had on the National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport and in Treasury Board, I learned how much power resides in the drafter’s pen. People can subsequently revise your text and even force you to start all over again, but usually the structure you decide determines the outcome. I set out make academic physical education and extra-curricular athletics indispensable to the core mission of the university, to give much greater emphasis to the Olympic sports, and to make participation – ­not spectatorship – ­the main activity for students. I argued that physical activity – s­ port, exercise, dance, and play – ­has been integral to the human experience in every known society, and ought to be fully and systematically studied by all the major disciplines. I also argued that, given the social importance of sports and the growing crisis in physical inactivity, the university

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had an obligation to train sports leaders and physical educators and to give every student the opportunity to participate. Such programs should be “integrated for men and women as much as possible.”1 I argued that, given its importance as a national university, U of T should “provide opportunities in a few carefully selected sports to pursue world standards of performance and provide for empirical research into the requirements of excellence in these sports.” The university should cooperate with Toronto Parks and Recreation to provide opportunities for members of the adjacent community, and, where possible, share its facilities with Toronto athletes and sports clubs. Finally, I recommended that the university should only provide spectator seating when everything else was achieved. For the most part, the draft was accepted with only a few objections. My colleagues in physical education wanted to go even further, recommending that the university re-establish compulsory physical education, sport, dance, and outdoor recreation in the curriculum for every undergraduate. Unfortunately, there was little appetite for a return to compulsory physical education. Those in athletics objected to the priority suggested for the Olympic and high-performance sports, fearing the marginalization of intercollegiate sports. They also objected to the low priority for spectatorship. But in the build-up to the Olympics, the ambition to improve Canadian performances in the Olympic sports enjoyed broad endorsement. U of T had supported the modern Olympics almost since their inception in 1896, and U of T students, coaches, and alumni had always played a prominent role. The only change Jill made was to put the objectives in order of importance: academics and extra-curricular athletics first, high-performance and community outreach second, and spectator sports third. Governing Council approved them without revision on December 20, 1973.



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The next challenge was to create an entirely new governing structure for physical education and athletics. Governing Council appointed a task force chaired by Gordon Fisher to consider the issue. Jack Dimond and I provided administrative support and research. Juri pushed eloquently for complete integration, under an academic head, similar to what many other Canadian universities had in place. It was not to be. After extensive consultation, the task force concluded that the work of integrating the Byzantine men’s and women’s programs on the one hand, and strengthening the academic credentials of the School on the other, would be so time-consuming that it would make more sense to pursue them separately. To that end, it recommended two independent bodies: an integrated department for athletics organized in alignment with the new objectives, and a strengthened School with complete control of its own faculty and finances. Jack and I persuaded Fisher to recommend student parity on a new athletics council and to include representatives from the City and high performance. While much would depend upon implementation, the new directions promised welcome change. The Fisher report also held out the possibility of a complete integration sometime in the future. I quietly filed that away for reference. The objectives proved invaluable in designing the new facility. The plan called for the creation of a new facility immediately to the west of (and connected to) the Benson Building on land that the university had already assembled. It was to have a 50-metre pool, a 10-metre diving tower, a large field house with a 200-metre six-lane track on a mezzanine above it, 12 squash courts, four labs, and offices for both the School and the integrated department. It also called for the conversion of a parking lot on the east side of St. George Street into an additional playing field; the enclosure of the outdoor skating/hockey rink at Robert Street Field so that it

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could be used throughout the year; and the construction of exercise rooms and saunas in as many other locations across campus as could be afforded. Critics felt that the Olympic-sized pool and the indoor track were redundant, but we countered that they were necessary to realize the objectives. Others wanted a single game court with 5,000 seats in the field house, but in keeping with the objectives, we laid out four courts. I was at pains to point out that while I loved watching sports and fully appreciated the community-building aspects of cheering for the home team, the priority was getting students active through participation. During the actual implementation, those who felt I would be proven wrong about spectators convinced the architects to design exits for large crowds. Since money and space were tight, there was a constant threat of “value engineering,” the euphemism for cutbacks that still brings chills to my heart. Ultimately, to save money, the university eliminated the planned mezzanine, lowering the track to the field-house level and the diving tower to an unusable seven metres and wiping out 35,000 square feet of activity space. The proposed new playing field, the enclosed rink, and the decentralized activity rooms were never built. It was terribly short-sighted. I vowed “never again.” Even more contentious was getting the approvals from the City. Resident and ratepayer groups in the surrounding community were bitterly opposed to the proposed building, calling it an “invasion” of their neighbourhood. Some of my friends in the municipal and provincial NDP piled on. We had already negotiated a community-use agreement with Toronto Parks and Recreation and designed special, street-level dressing rooms for the purpose. That mattered little to the critics. While 86 per cent of undergraduate students voted in a referendum to support the new building with a fee increase, the graduate students’ union decried it as “elitist.”



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After concerted lobbying, we got the votes at City Council. The building was opened in 1979, named after former men’s athletic director Warren Stevens. While I always regretted the last-minute cuts, the integrated complex, officially named the Physical Education and Athletic Centre, nicknamed the “AC” and scorned as “Fort Jock,” quickly became popular and well used. In 1975, Jill became the first woman president of Smith College in the United States. I have always been grateful for her mentorship. She certainly left her mark on me and U of T. About the same time, the Ontario Track and Field Association asked me to lead the effort to improve track and field facilities in southern Ontario. While Toronto had bid for the 1976 Olympics, the region had few adequate facilities for the Olympic sports, so that many athletes were forced to move to other cities and countries to train. In track, the precipitating crisis was a proposal by the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto to renovate the stadium at the Canadian National Exhibition for Major League Baseball. It would eliminate the track that had long been used for club training and major events. Metro chairman Paul Godfrey wanted a publicly funded domed stadium to attract an MLB team, and when that failed to gain support, he proposed the CNE renovation instead. Abby Hoffman and I tried to talk him out of it, but he had no interest in supporting Canadian-based athletes. When his proposal came to committee for consideration, I took a large group of sweat-suited athletes and coaches to the meeting to voice our objections. Alderman Karl Jaffary passed me a note asking how much we would need to build a new facility elsewhere in Metro. Off the top of my head, I wrote down $2 million, and because the CNE also housed a barebones indoor facility at the Sheep and Swine Palace, suggested that Metro build us both indoor and outdoor facilities. Karl immediately moved an amendment to that effect and it sailed through the committee and Metro Council.

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While it took several years to find a site – ­neighbourhood groups in both East York and North York objected to our first choices – ­eventually York University agreed to provide the land in exchange for a shared-use agreement. Abby, Ian Anderson, and I constituted the design advisory committee. The only thing we didn’t get was an agreement to name it after deceased Olympian Bobbie Rosenfeld. While difficult to reach by public transit – ­the subway to York University was only opened in 2017 – ­the Metro Track and Field Centre gave the sport a tremendous boost. With one foot in the university and the other in the community, I was just where I wanted to be. I quickly made the School my base of operations and never looked back.

16 CRITICAL SUPPORT FOR THE OLYMPICS

On May 12, 1970, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1976 Olympics to Montreal. The decision caused me great anguish, forcing me to clarify my relationship to sports like never before. Among most of my colleagues, friends, and students, Montreal was a failed city, with an autocratic mayor and an appalling indifference to poverty and pollution. The IOC was equally autocratic, and the Games were extravagant, unnecessary, and redolent of the worst of nationalism and Cold War rivalries. They feared that the Montreal Olympics, like Expo ’67, would impose huge debts upon taxpayers all across Canada. There was a touch of regional jealousy to these charges. After all, Toronto bid unsuccessfully for those same Games. But there was a good deal of truth. During the 1970 municipal election in Montreal, Mayor Jean Drapeau took advantage of the FLQ crisis to smear his opponents as revolutionaries. With the Canadian army in the streets, his party won every seat. On City Council, he rarely allowed questions and never held public consultations. He promised to pay for the Games by cutting back on municipal services. The city pumped 92 per cent of its sewage without treatment into the St. Lawrence – 460 ­­ million gallons a

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day, worrying communities downstream and environmentalists everywhere. The IOC’s record was no better. On the eve of the 1968 Games, it looked the other way when the Mexican government murdered hundreds of students. They were protesting the distorted priorities represented by the investment in the Olympics and the 1970 World Cup over housing and education. At the Games, IOC president Brundage expelled Black medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their podium protest against racism and poverty in the US, in complete violation of their rights. It was alarming to see them punished for extolling the Olympic values. Four years later at the Munich Olympics, the Palestinian group Black September calmly entered the athletes’ village and murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, a frightening violation of the idea of Olympic Truce. It raised the spectre that future Games could only take place behind heavy military security and the suspension of civil rights. In both Quebec and English-speaking Canada, the media and public opinion were universally negative. There was little to inspire confidence or enthusiasm. It seemed to take forever for an organizing committee and a budget to be established. It was crazy-making to see the way that Mayor Drapeau prepared for these Games, without a pan-Canadian sports plan, without consultation with citizens, athletes, and coaches. He made himself the butt of jokes by promising that “the Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.” If it had been any other project, these concerns would have led me to join the naysayers. But this was the Olympics. I had identified with the Olympic ideals ever since my father told me about the 1952 Games in Helsinki. I loved their unabashed pursuit of excellence and their eloquent commitment to education through sport, liberal humanitarianism, and peaceful intercultural exchange. My own experiences in Tokyo validated those ideals. I had always wanted to see the Games come to Canada to jumpstart



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democratic sport development and break down the parochialism of Canadian sports. What to do? I spent weeks agonizing about the alternatives in furious runs along the lake, late-night debates with friends, and articles and letters to the editor. Determined not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, I began to firm up the strategy of “critical support for sport” that I had been moving towards ever since my first public statements in the early 1960s. Against those who called for abolition, I extolled the benefits of properly conducted international sport and argued for Olympic reforms. Against those who endorsed the Games without question, I argued that we should support both the Games and those Montreal activists fighting to minimize the damage from Olympic preparations. When Roger Jackson, the Tokyo gold medallist and director of high-performance sport for Sport Canada, convened a group of prominent Olympic athletes, including Toller Cranston, Nancy Greene, Louise Hanna, Abby Hoffman, Harry Jerome, and me, to develop a statement in support of the Games, I refused to sign unless we said that As sportsmen, we declare ourselves on the side of those people who want better health care, housing, pollution control and the other necessities of life that are the inherent right of all Canadians. We demand better social conditions and sport opportunities in Montreal and all of Canada.

In all of these calculations, Doug Gilbert was my closest confidant and informant. A former EYTC teammate, Doug had become the Olympic reporter for the Montreal Gazette. A brilliant investigative journalist, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports, took a strongly athlete-centred approach, and worked around the clock. We spent hours on the phone and in trips together. Given the tremendous secrecy within which the Games were prepared – even

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Canadian IOC member Jim Worrall, who sat on the executive of the organizing committee, complained that he had little knowledge about major decisions – Doug’s frequent scoops and almost daily reports remain the best record of the preparations and staging of those Games. Sadly, he was killed in a car accident while covering the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was a terrible loss to Canadian sport. I mourn him to this day.

ESPACES VERTS AND THE FIGHT FOR THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE Espaces verts was a coalition of environmentalists, trade unions, architects, and citizen groups dedicated to saving undeveloped land on the island of Montreal for public recreation. It strenuously opposed the plans to bulldoze 55 acres of a public golf course in east Montreal’s Parc Viau for a high-rise apartment complex to serve as the Olympic Village. To save parkland and money, the city planning department had proposed that Olympic participants live in student residences and eight smaller new housing projects distributed around the main Olympic Stadium. Mayor Drapeau rejected the idea, claiming that the IOC insisted upon a single, newly constructed Village. I thought it was important for athletes from English Canada to support environmentally responsible Games, so I travelled to ­Montreal to meet with Espaces verts. I feared they might reject my overtures out of hand, but it turned out that they had no objections to the Olympics, just to the plans for the Olympic Village. It was the first of many such lessons in the build-up to the Games. I began to realize that outside the left, most people expected me to argue for sport, admired the Olympic principles, and supported reforms. It gave me a lot of confidence. I quickly endorsed their campaign.



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We got nowhere with Mayor Drapeau, but found a friend in Victor Goldbloom, the Quebec minister of municipal affairs and the environment. He was as frustrated with Drapeau and the IOC as we were, pointing out in one of his letters that “green spaces of all kinds are vital and Montreal has less of them than any other major urban area on the North American Continent.” He began a comprehensive effort to correct that, purchasing the 1,250-acre Boucherville Islands as parkland to compensate for the lost golf course, ensuring that the remaining acreage of the golf course would become a public park, and initiating a multi-year plan for green space in the Greater Montreal Area. Dr. Goldbloom would remain a thorn in Drapeau’s side for the course of the Games, regularly correcting the mayor’s outrageous financial claims. In 1975, when many feared that the organizing committee could not complete the corruption-plagued construction of the main stadium and other facilities on time, the provincial government put him in charge. He was one of the unheralded saviours of the Games. The construction of the Olympic Village became a scandal too. The developers plagiarized the design from an apartment complex on the French Riviera (with outdoor corridors, pleasant along the Mediterranean but punishing in the Montreal winters!). Construction was so shoddy that when the athletes moved in, ceilings and walls were warped. It had to be completely redone, at great expense, after the Games. I have always believed that the Olympic project should demonstrate excellence in everything. The Village was an embarrassment from beginning to end.

THE ARTISTS-ATHLETES COALITION Drapeau won the Games without any assurance of federal support (which, in previous major games, covered one-third of the

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costs), confident that he could persuade Ottawa after the fact. Some in the Trudeau government intended to come to his aid, but once it lost its majority in the federal election of 1972, they felt unable to do so. The tremendous inflation of the early 1970s brought about by US president Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard and the oil-producing countries’ sharp increases in the price of oil further discombobulated Olympic budgeting. The first budget released by the organizing committee was extremely thin. One traditional Olympic activity drastically cut back was the arts and culture program. Only $100,000 was budgeted, with a single staff person appointed to plan and conduct it. Roger Rousseau, the head of the organizing committee, told me that “young people only care if the sporting events are properly organized. I don’t think the cultural events will be missed.” I was extremely upset by this decision. The cultural programs in Tokyo, Mexico, and Munich had blown me away. Mexico constructed a folk arts village across from the athletes’ village, gave both groups access to each others’ activities, and toured teams of athletes and artists throughout the country after the Games. Munich conducted a three-month festival of daily events in all the major artistic disciplines, many of which were free in Olympic Park. It sent fine art posters around the world. I first saw those posters in Toronto libraries. The arts had been part of the Olympics since 1912, first with formal international competitions in music, literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture, with the winners receiving the same gold, silver, and bronze medals as the athletes, and then, after 1948, festivals. I had always loved the idea that the arts were part of the Olympics; sport and the arts play similar roles in fostering the understanding and imagination of communities. I knew some of the leaders of the Canadian Artists’ Representation, nationalist painters like Greg Curnoe and Kim Ondaatje, who had organized



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to protect their copyright and win fees for exhibitions of their work. It was obvious that athletes and artists shared many ambitions and concerns. I felt that a successful arts festival would broaden the constituencies for the Olympics, and combat the jealousies and suspicions that some sportspersons had for the arts world and vice versa. Even the generally progressive Task Force on Sport for Canadians rued the money governments spent on the arts. As Mavor Moore commented, “It sounds like the Indians complaining that the Eskimos are getting too much money (when both are starving).”1 At the time, Quebec and English-speaking Canada were exploding with new writing, music, theatre, painting, dance, and much else. I thought the Olympics could showcase the best of this new work to the world. My first effort was to hold a party to bring artists and athletes together, in Hart House at the University of Toronto in the spring of 1973. My collaborators included Abby Hoffman and Marion Lay, Mavor Moore, Earl Rosen, painter Joyce Weiland, sculptor Dora de Pédery-Hunt, and photographer Tom Gibson. We called ourselves the Artists Athletes Coalition. National team gymnasts vaulted and spun, Irving Layton and John Newlove read poetry, and John Weinzweig conducted a special performance of the Divertimento for Flute and Strings that won him the Olympic championship for composition at the 1948 Olympics in London. Then we had a discussion with open mikes. It was a blast. The day generated a long list of proposals, including • Olympic reporting, documentation, and interpretation by Canadian filmmakers, photographers, poets, writers, dancers, playwrights, and painters. • The immediate commissioning of 30 artists to create Olympic posters for the Games.

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• Funds to commission new work exploring the Canadian experience with sport and physical culture, including a new Olympic ballet. • Collaborative projects between artists and sports clubs to redesign uniforms and logos to more accurately and attractively reflect local cultures. • A series of performances and exhibitions of new work across Canada. • School-based projects in both sport and the arts. • A home-and-away travel exchange with international artists. During the following year, along with the Canadian Conference of the Arts, we lobbied the organizing committee, the federal government, and as many provincial governments as we could to ensure a proper festival. One significant ally became the Ontario government, which created its own program, Circus ’76, to fund convergent local sports and arts projects during 1976. Little seemed to be happening in Montreal, however, so in 1975, Abby, Earl, gallery owner Av Isaacs, and I wrote the Canada Council proposing an Olympic poster project featuring Canadian artists. Av was a U of T grad in political economy and a passionate supporter of new Canadian painting. I regularly dropped into his gallery on my runs and we became good friends. To our delight and surprise, Timothy Porteous, the Council’s associate director, immediately phoned asking for a meeting. He flew to Toronto the very next day. We met in the Isaac Gallery. Porteous said he loved our proposal and would be pleased to fund it, but only on three conditions. First, Av as a private gallery owner would have to leave the committee. That was a “no,” we said. He quickly replied, “I expected that, and that’s OK.” Then he said that the word “Canada” had to appear prominently on the posters, not “Montreal.” The federal government wanted the favourable visibility that he expected from the project. We wondered



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about the politics but said “fine.” Then he looked at us sternly and said, “We don’t think you’ve asked for enough money; we’d like to double your budget and do it right!” We almost fell off our chairs. In the subsequent months, we commissioned 36 Canadian artists to submit posters and held a pan-Canadian competition that attracted almost 300 entries. In the end, we selected ten images – by Pierre Ayot, Jacques Hurtubise, Kenneth Lochhead, Lucy, Robin Mackenzie, Jean McEwan, Guido Molinari, N.E. Thing, Michael Snow, and Claude Tousignant – and a frame designed by Burton Kramer. We printed 12,000 sets, exhibited them in the Olympic swimming pool in Montreal, gave individual posters to delegation heads, athletes, and coaches in the Village, and sent sets around the world. I still see them in poster displays from time to time. About the same time, I saw a production of Theatre Passe ­Muraille’s The Farm Show. Director Paul Thompson had taken actors to a rural community near Clinton, Ontario, where they lived and worked with farmers and heard their stories. They collectively developed a play about the farmers’ lives, performed it for those very farmers in a nearby auction barn, and took it to theatres and community centres all across Canada. It was the most moving work of affirmation I had ever seen. I wanted the same for ­Canadian athletes. Paul was a formidable figure, with a full beard and a fierce visage, and Passe Muraille had a reputation for battling with the police. I screwed up my courage and invited him for a drink. It turned out that he had been an intercollegiate wrestler at Western and immediately embraced the idea. The Canada Council gave us a grant to do the play. During the spring and early summer of 1976, I took the actors – Layne Coleman, Clare Coulter, David Fox, Janet-Laine Green, Joann McIntyre, Eric Peterson, and Booth Savage – to training halls, Olympic Trials, and media conferences, and set up interviews with athletes and coaches. We assembled in ­Lennoxville, Quebec, where Paul was directing another play, for story generation and

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rehearsals. John Boyle painted life-size cut-outs of famous Canadian athletes for the set and John Gray wrote lyrics and music. It was magic how Paul put it all together. The Athletes’ Show was performed in the Centaur Theatre in Montreal the week before the Opening Ceremony, and then in a theatre tent in the Olympic Village. There were scenes about famous champions Tom Longboat, Tommy Burns, and Vladimir Kuts and current Canadian team members Alex Oakley and Diane Jones; the hurt and anxiety provoked by the Olympic sex test; and the stubbornness of Mayor Drapeau. In the final days of the Games, we mimed it for non-English speakers on tables in the dining hall. In the last scene, David Fox played me describing the sense of community that international sport creates. Christie Blatchford of the Globe and Mail wrote: You may know Bruce Kidd as a critic of the Canadian sport establishment, which he is. You may imagine him to be bitter and cynical, and sometimes he has been those things. But the Bruce Kidd who wrote The Athletes’ Show is nothing more than an old runner whose heart belongs to the track. There are poignant scenes but perhaps the best is the last one. The race is over, the runners are jogging around the track, working the stiffness out. They put their arms around each other, stick closely together. For four years, they have worked to get to the end of one race, and now that it’s over, they are reluctant to leave. They don’t want to go home because they are home. And unless they are incredibly gifted or lucky, they, like Bruce Kid[d], never go home again.2

Overall, the campaign for a vibrant Olympic arts program was unsuccessful. John Fraser of the Globe and Mail panned the resulting program as “a thorough-going flop.”3 Three days before the Opening Ceremonies, the City of Montreal gave the festival another black eye when it tore down one of the most intriguing



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collaborations, Corrid’Art, a 12-artist streetscape of sculptures and drawings critical of the pace of downtown development. Yet Fraser and other critics praised our play as an “exception.” The athletes who saw it loved it, especially the scenes about themselves. For a while, it did broaden the conversation about sports and the arts. Twelve years later, at the time of the Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, Paul and I did it again with The Games of Winter. It toured across Canada in step with the Olympic Torch Relay and played before athletes and coaches in the Olympic Village.

FIGHTING FOR SPORT The great tragedy of the Montreal Olympics was that, with so little consultation and advance planning, we had little time to put comprehensive, sustaining sports development in place, let alone properly prepare an Olympic Team that would do Canada proud. In 1970, most cities in Canada lacked the basic facilities for the Olympic sports. There was not a single indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool or ten-metre diving tower between Montreal and Winnipeg. The best Toronto swimmers and divers left town to train. Sport Quebec and Sport Canada were just being created. Nevertheless, the basics of the “Canadian sports system” we know today were hurriedly put in place during the build-up to the Games. Between 1970 and 1976, the federal government increased the budget for high-performance sport five times. Many provinces followed suit. It was frantic catch-up. There were constant studies, pilot projects, meetings, and debates. After the retirement of Avery Brundage in 1972, the International Olympic Committee put an end to strict amateurism, permitting athletes to receive living stipends and an unlimited amount of expenses. More countries were investing in sports science and specialized

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coaching. These changes stimulated another big step towards full-time training. Our knowledge was enhanced by the expanded internationalism that the Olympics encouraged. The 1970s brought a thaw in the Cold War, and Canada signed cultural exchanges with the socialist countries. Many of us travelled to the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba to see their sports systems first-hand, while representatives of those countries came to see the Montreal preparations. One of these was Klaus Huhn, sports editor of Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of the ruling Socialist Unity Party in the GDR. Klaus and I immediately hit it off when he told me that as an eight-year-old watching the final of the 100 metres during the 1936 Olympics, he could not understand why Jesse Owens and the other sprinters failed to run around the entire track! In 1946, at 18, Klaus became Neues Deutschland’s sports editor. He had just two qualifications; as the son of prominent communists, he could be trusted, and he had a bicycle to get around the devastated city of Berlin to report on events. He quickly turned the opportunity into a position of influence. In the early years of GDR sports, when the international federations did not recognize the GDR but the European sportswriters’ association did, Klaus was often the only one who could get a visa to cover international events. He used that to agitate for the GDR’s inclusion. It was the epitome of the Olympic relationships envisioned by Coubertin, an acceptance of difference but respect through a shared love of sports. Klaus was an uncompromising communist. He once introduced me to an audience at Humboldt University as “a mere social democrat.” He was a proud defender of what the fledgling GDR had achieved between the rock of western capitalism and the hard place of Soviet control. We argued about whether those circumstances justified the harsh treatment of internal critics. We argued about doping. Klaus never denied



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that GDR athletes used steroids, countering that as long as western athletes were using them and the international federations turned a blind eye, the GDR would ensure that its athletes had a fair chance. Despite these differences, we remained friends until his death in 2017. I took my students every year to Montreal to see the developments and to interview insiders and outsiders. To my great surprise, Mayor Drapeau rolled out the red carpet. When I began questioning him about his autocratic approach to the Games, he walked across the room, put his arms around me, and said, “Bruce, Bruce, we want the same thing. Why do we disagree?” It was completely disarming. I immediately understood how he won over the IOC. I came to see him as the devil in the morality play, the villain everyone reluctantly admires. While my friends on the left continued to savage the Olympics, I threw myself into improving facilities and opportunities for Canadian athletes to compete in Montreal. One of my most cherished proposals was to create an official “popular” marathon as part of the Games. The idea was to give the thousands of spectators who were active sports enthusiasts a chance for Olympic participation, and to create a “sport for all” component of the Games. It came from Hal Higdon, a distinguished marathoner, writer, and member of the University of Chicago Track Club. While the organizing committee had its hands full just preparing for the already approved events, we thought we had the ear of Simon St. Pierre, an executive vice president of the organizing committee until he was tragically killed in a horse riding accident in 1975. The marathon never happened. In 1983, when Helsinki held the very first world athletics championships, a public marathon was held over the official course on the rest day, but the idea was never continued. Today, when I watch one of the big marathons (e.g., Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, or Tokyo) and bask in the spirit of effusive internationalism they

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encourage among runners and spectators from many different countries, I think it was an Olympic opportunity lost. Our most contentious campaign was getting adequate financial support for Canadian athletes training for the Games. Despite the liberalization of the rules for Olympic eligibility, Canadian authorities refused to make any improvements. While Olympic suppliers and workers on the Olympic venues made record revenues and wages, the prospective members of the 1976 Canadian Olympic Team were broke and starving. I heard the stories first-hand from the runners with whom I was training. In 1974, I had an injury-free year and found more time to train. I kept improving, had several good 10Ks, and won the Atlanta Marathon in a personal best of 2:20.18. I began dreaming about another Olympics in the marathon. Other track athletes, especially Canada’s best marathoner, Jerome Drayton, shared their worries. Jerome felt he could not continue to the Olympics without financial support. He had exhausted his savings and was cutting back on what he ate. It was only a matter of time before he quit running to get a job. Many other athletes told me the same. In the winter of 1975, Abby Hoffman, Chris Preobrazenzki (a top judoka and U of T master’s student), Nancy Thomson (a former national team swimmer who was in my class in the political economy of sport), and I canvassed those athletes considered “hopefuls” for the Olympic Team about their income and expenses. Of 285 questionnaires, 123 were mailed back in just two weeks. The results were even more discouraging than we feared. The majority experienced severe financial difficulties. Many were unemployed, living on welfare or Unemployment Insurance, or depending upon parents’ or spouses’ incomes for support, even stealing food. Athletes eligible for federal grants-in-aid said that the cheques came late or not at all. Employed athletes reported that employers were reluctant to give them time away from work to compete abroad, and in some cases fired them outright.



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No one said that their training was too onerous, only that they couldn’t afford to train without the basic conditions of life. Many were extremely bitter: “Athletes who qualify for the Olympics should perform in their own choice of dress and burn their Canadian uniforms in protest,” one wrote. “It is certainly too late to get into the lineup for medals.” Another wrote: “How can Canada expect me to do my best and train for them? Eating peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner is a bit too much. When the hell are we going to get some respect? Why train when you’re hungry and have no pride!” In response, we developed a proposal for athlete support based on the revenues and expenses identified and mailed it to the athletes. It included a basic living stipend of $200 a month “to be granted without a means test,” tuition and fees for student athletes, and a variety of supports, including child care, special equipment, and medical expenses not covered by Medicare, based on application and demonstrated need. The endorsement was overwhelming, so we presented it to the federal government. It turned us down. Minister Marc Lalonde and officials from Sport Canada told us that “professionalizing Olympic sport” was bad social policy, that if Canadian athletes received $200 a month they would quit school or their jobs and become athletic “bums.” Out of desperation, we gave it to the media. We feared that some reporter would find one athlete who was opposed and it would be over. I was driving to Kingston when Barbara Frum began to interview the Hamilton weightlifter Russ Prior on CBC’s As It Happens about the proposal. Russ could be argumentative, and I was so nervous that I pulled over and parked on the shoulder of the 401. But we had done our homework. Russ told Barbara that he fully supported the proposal and wished that we had asked for more. We cranked up the pressure by saying that unless our demands were met, we would continue to take political action, “up to and including a strike of the Olympic Games.” The analogy I used

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came from India. The year I taught there, the beggars in Varanasi went on strike, saying that unless pilgrims increased their donations, they would not give the blessings required for the washing away of sins in the Ganges. I said that the athletes were like the beggars at Varanasi, justifying the entire Olympic project with their symbolic labour. We received considerable editorial-page support, but sports columnists who covered professional athletes every day went nuts. Jack Mathieson of the Winnipeg Tribune called the proposal “unthinkable … An Olympic march-in without Canada would replace the Polish joke, which was never very funny anyway.”4 Dick ­Beddoes of the Globe and Mail warned that our proposals would bring about a Soviet-style revolution, unbearable impoverishment, and a forfeiting of the intellectual’s most cherished heritage, the right to talk back. Solzhenitsyn’s ordeal should remind Hoffman and Kidd and every other Canadian of the horrible price the proletarian dictators must exact in return for the least amelioration of the conditions of the masses. Okay. Stop whining and start winning.5

I had fun with that. I wrote the Globe urging the editors to encourage Beddoes to defect for his own safety and peace of mind. After all, after our band of 300 Olympic athletes seizes the means of production, Parliament, the provincial legislatures, all newspapers, radio and TV stations, we’ll probably want to talk to him about his sports column.

“Athletes tell Beddoes to defect” was the header the very next day. Our campaign did convince the Canadian Olympic Association. Worried about sponsors, the COA invited Abby to Montreal to negotiate. We got virtually everything we asked for, including



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individualized packages of support and athlete-led administration. Abby took a leave from her teaching job at the University of Guelph to become the administrator, and Jerome Drayton became her assistant, with a training-sensitive schedule. Bob Secord of the Ontario government provided offices in Toronto. The financial support enabled Canadian athletes to make their best showing since the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Abby made her fourth Olympic Team and her teammates unanimously elected her to carry the Canadian flag into the Opening Ceremonies. ­Jerome went on to set a Canadian record in the marathon that lasted more than 40 years. He finished sixth in the Olympic marathon and won Boston the following year. It was the start of ­Abby’s and Jerome’s long careers in the public service, and after the Games, the basis of Sport Canada’s Athlete Assistance Program. In April 1976, I stood with my students overlooking the construction site of the Olympic Stadium. None of us believed that it would be ready in time. But the genius of the concrete building-block design of French architect Roger Taillibert, a 24–7 work schedule those last few months, and Victor Goldbloom’s determination made it happen. When the Games opened on July 17, 1976, the organization proved flawless. Romania’s Nadia Comãneci opened the gymnastics with a string of perfect 10s; Edwin Moses of the US set a new world record in the men’s 400 hurdles; and the Polish men’s volleyball team defeated the favoured Soviet Union in a marathon match. Many others gave spectators and millions of television viewers around the world a whole new vocabulary of athletic excellence. Across Canada, the round-the-clock colour CBC coverage inspired thousands of children and youth to take up sports they had never witnessed before. A joyous, intercultural spirit reigned throughout. “Gold medal for Montreal” proclaimed the headline in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, the day after the Closing Ceremonies. John

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MacAloon, the University of Chicago anthropologist who studies Olympic ceremonies and rituals, calls Montreal the most festive of the post-Second World War period. Long after the camera crews packed up after the Closing Ceremonies, he observed, people were partying in the Olympic spirit. Nevertheless, the events were marred by the politics of international sport. Almost at the same time as the Olympics, a New Zealand rugby team toured South Africa, thumbing its nose at the international moratorium on sport with the apartheid state. When the IOC refused to condemn the tour, 29 African, Asian, and Caribbean nations took their teams home from Montreal (or never arrived) in protest. The departures hurt boxing, soccer, and track and field the most. The week before the Games, I watched Ethiopian and Kenyan runners destroy Canadian records in the distance events in a series of time trials. Now those remarkable runners, like Tanzania’s Filbert Bayi and Ethiopia’s Miruts Yifter, would not compete. I did not make the Olympic Team. In 1975 and 1976, I incurred a succession of injuries and could never reach the times required. Drayton, Tom Howard, and Wayne Yetman (with whom I trained at Varsity Stadium) represented Canada in the marathon. But my artistic efforts and journalism got me credentials to everything. Even without the Africans, it was one of the best track meets I have ever seen. I will never forget the remarkable doubles of Cuba’s Alberto Juantorena in the men’s 400 and 800, the Soviet Union’s Tatanya Kazinkina in the women’s 800 and 1500, and Finland’s Lasse Viren in the men’s 5,000 and 10,000 metres. In the 5,000, Viren took over the lead with 1,000 metres remaining, accelerating so gradually that it looked like anyone could pass him at any time. The entire field stayed bunched on his heels ready to pounce. Viren continued to accelerate, running each succeeding 100-metre segment slightly faster, so that, one by one, the very best runners in the world withered in the inferno of his wake while he



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kept his icy cool right up to the finish line. It still gives me chills to watch the replays. The uneasiness about all the might-have-beens never left, however. In an assessment for Weekend magazine written during the Closing Ceremonies, I said: For two weeks, all the contradictions seemed to stand still. In those magic moments, you forget that an entire continent felt it had to leave these Games, that the island of Montreal was an armed camp, or that the whole celebration cost about 10 times more than it should have. A golden opportunity to democratize sport and play has been largely dissipated. The balance sheet is not a happy one. The Games cannot survive many more Montreals.6

More than 40 years later, I continue to see the Montreal Olympics as a kaleidoscope of achievements and contradictions, a “multiple narrative.” Despite the tremendous debt from extravagant, corruption-inflated, poorly constructed facilities that took Quebeckers decades to pay off, the IOC, other host cities, and governments across Canada have profitably adopted the financial policies Montreal put in place for the operations of the Games. One of its revenue initiatives, the lottery, now supplements public services in sport, culture, and health. It is rarely acknowledged that Montreal earned a surplus on its operations. Some of the initiatives taken at the time had long fuses, notably the encouragement of Montreal and Quebec sports. Up until those Games, francophone Quebeckers were significantly under-represented in Canadian championships and on Canadian national teams; in the Olympic sports, “Quebec” meant McGill and Westmount. The 1976 Olympics began a proud new age for Quebec sport. Today, francophone Quebec athletes regularly lead Canadian teams. ­After the city of Montreal dug itself out from Olympic debt, it has provided some of the very best opportunities for its citizens in the country.

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In English-speaking Canada, expenditures on sport levelled off after Montreal, and it took two other Olympics, Calgary and Vancouver-Whistler, to prime the pump again. We still rely heavily on major games as a strategy of domestic development. It works … to a point. It has given us important new facilities, program funds, and endowments for the major sports bodies. But after countless Olympic and Paralympic, Commonwealth, and Pan and Parapan American Games, we still lack a comprehensive strategy for the development of broadly based sport. Mayor Drapeau once told me that it will never happen in any other way, that with the perennial low levels of public support for amateur sport across Canada, even the modest facility and program development that did occur in the 1970s would never have happened without the adrenalin he created by winning the Games. Other politicians have said the same. In 1999, during Toronto’s bid for the 2008 Olympics, I asked Ontario premier Mike Harris: “Wouldn’t it just make more sense to develop the facilities and programs we need and save ourselves the time and expense of wooing somewhat questionable international officials to stage their Games, just so that we can justify investments in our own opportunities?” He thought about it for quite a while and then replied: “That would be the logical thing to do but it would never work in Canada. No politician can justify facilities for amateur sport without a major Games!” It’s crazy-making.

1  Margaret and Roby Kidd with Ross and me. (Personal collection)

2  East Riverdale pee wee baseball, CNE and City of Toronto champions 1956. Coach John Flynn (rear, left) was a stickler for “getting it right.” I’m in the back row, third from the right. (Turofsky)

3  East York Track Club and friends after a meet in London, 1960. Led by Fred Foot (rear, wearing a hat), EYTC was a tightly knit, supportive family. L to R back row: Orville Atkins, Marion Munroe, George Shepherd, John Telford (Wayne State), Fred Foot, Jim Irons (TOC), and Doug Gilbert. Middle row: Jim Snider, Bill Crothers, Bryan Emery, Al Smith, Paul Munro. Front row: Bud Scott and me. (Personal collection)

4  Boston rocketed me into the headlines. (Toronto Telegram, January 16, 1961)

5  After my academic success in Grade 13, I became the symbol of virtuous Canadian youth. (Blaine MacDonald, Globe and Mail, August 25, 1961)

6  New Canadian six-mile record, BECG Trials, 1962. Sometimes you battled other runners, sometimes you raced against the clock. In this one, I was entirely on my own, lapping the entire field on a hot night. (Mihkel Turk Collection, University of Toronto Archives)

7  Triumph for Canada. George Shepherd and Bill Crothers, teammates from EYTC and U of T, hoist me after gold medal at the 1962 Commonwealth Games. (Herald and Weekly Times, Melbourne, Australia)

8  One lap to go in the three-mile race at the 1962 Commonwealth Games. L to R: Pat Clohessy (Australia), Murray Halberg (New Zealand), Derek Ibbotson (England), me, Ron Clarke (Australia), and John Anderson (England). Halberg won, Clarke was second, and I was third. Years later, Halberg and I spent most of an afternoon discussing our tactics in that race. (New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame)

9  The Police Games at Varsity Stadium was a well-attended event throughout the 1950s and 1960s. (Jack Reppen cartoon, Toronto Star, July 22, 1961)

10  Indoor track was virtually a different sport, with narrow lanes, tight-banked turns, and spectators and photographers almost in your face. I loved it. (Barry Philp)

11  Canada’s Athlete of the Year, 1961. (Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame)

12  Onondaga elders made me an Honorary Runner of Messages, after a race in Hamilton, 1963. It inspired my subsequent research on Tom Longboat. (Personal collection)

13  I loved Harry Jerome. We became great friends. (Mihkel Turk, University of Toronto Archives)

14  With Bill Crothers and Fred Foot at Madison Square Gardens. I never lost a race in New York. (Mihkel Turk, University of Toronto Archives)

15  Taking off for the next stage in my life, with David Kidd and me on the tarmac. Top to bottom on the stairs: Earl Rosen, Dwayne Wright, John Scott, and Nelles Van Loon. (Getty Images)

16  Leaving Buckingham Palace on the first leg of the Queen’s Message Relay, 1966 Commonwealth Games, accompanied by Brian Kilby (L) and Bruce Tulloh. Moments later we tried to open up the baton to read the message inside but were unsuccessful. (Royal Palace, Keystone Press Agency)

17  Canadian Marathon Championships, Waterloo, 1974. Even though I had little time to train, I thoroughly enjoyed my races in those years, perhaps because there was no pressure. (Personal collection)

18  Getting the Montreal Olympics to include the arts was a struggle, but I succeeded in producing a fine art poster series and a play. Playbill for The Athletes’ Show, 1976 Olympics. (Personal collection)

19  Sam Ramsamy (R) was the indefatigable strategist and organizer for the international campaign against apartheid sport. Once apartheid was repealed, he led the first non-racial South African team into the 1992 Olympics. (Personal collection)

20  Olympic teammate Marion Lay has been a relentless, resourceful advocate for gender equity in Canadian and international sport. (Personal collection)

21  When World Athletics suspended Indian sprinter Dutee Chand (centre) for “too much” natural testosterone, Payoshni Mitra (L) organized her fight back campaign and recruited me to help. We won. (Personal collection)

22  I met Phyllis through the Calgary Winter Olympics and she won my heart in the Canadian Rockies. (Personal collection)

23  U of T colleague Peter Donnelly and I often talk through ideas on travels and hikes. In this photo, we’ve just climbed Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa) in Wales, near where Peter grew up. (Personal collection)

24  Australian miler John Landy inspired me to become a distance runner during the “Miracle Mile” in Vancouver in 1954. In this photo, taken in Melbourne in 2006, we’re joined by Trevor Vincent (standing, middle), a fellow Commonwealth gold medallist (in the steeplechase), who coordinates a network of former distance runners from all over the world. (Personal collection)

25  Rick Gruneau recruited me to the emerging field of sports sociology in the early 1970s. We still visit each other whenever we can. In this photo, taken about 1985, he’s with his wife, Shelley, and their daughter Danielle. (Personal collection)

26  My research on Indigenous games led me to the North American Indigenous Games in 1993 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. L to R front row: Billy Mills, Alwyn Morris, Eugene Arcand, and Rick Brant. Back row: Cara Currie Hall, a Saskatchewan athlete, me, and Fred Sasakamoose. When Billy saw me for the first time in many years, he told the others he’d “never seen this person before.” Then he turned me around, stared at my back, and said “O my, it’s Bruce Kidd.” (Personal collection)

27  The International Olympic Academy in Greece seeks to keep the original humanitarian spirit of the Olympics alive through annual seminars for athletes, coaches, referees, academics, and journalists from all over the world. I coordinated Canadian participation for many years. Here are the Canadians at the opening ceremonies in Athens, with IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch and Greek culture minister Melinda Mercouri. (Personal collection)

28  Bill Crothers and I celebrated the reopening of the Varsity track in 2007 by running a lap together and then handing the baton over to Megan Brown. (University of Toronto)

29  It took almost 30 years for the magnificent Toronto Pan American Sports Centre to be realized on the campus of the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2015. It was ultimately enabled by the leadership of UTSC students. So I was pleased, as principal at the time, to celebrate it with them. (Ken Jones, University of Toronto Scarborough)

30  Convocation became one of my favourite times of the year. After challenging and supporting students to the best of your ability, you can smile and tell them how good they were, meet their parents and significant others, and rejoice. (University of Toronto)

31  Of many allies during my years of advocacy with Sport Canada, Judy Kent (L) and Sylvie Bigras were among the most astute and supportive. (Personal collection)

32  With Phyllis and Adrienne Clarkson in 2005. Of all the honours I’ve received, I’m proudest of the Order of Canada, because I’ve always sought to link my sports activism to the health of Canadian society. (Personal collection)

17 THE BOYCOTT THAT WORKED

Imagine that, as a protest against Canadian laws and policies, no one travelled to Canada to play us in hockey or any other sport. If Canadians tried to compete in other countries, we faced mass protests, sabotaged facilities, and even fusillades of rotten eggs and tomatoes. It would certainly get our attention. Such universal condemnation is what the international sports boycott gradually achieved against South Africa during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It contributed significantly to the abolition of the oppressive racism and exploitation known as apartheid in the early 1990s. The sports boycott was a battle for the very soul of sports. How could we extend the handshake of friendship to those who denied it to others because of their skin colour? How could we claim the pursuit of excellence when the country against which we were playing barred the majority of their fellow citizens from competition based on race? For more than 20 years, I played an active role in this campaign, pressuring the Canadian government to prevent Canadian-South African sporting exchanges, and trying to persuade Canadian athletes and sports leaders to support it. It was hard to tell other athletes to withdraw from events they sought. But sport is a code of values, I reminded them, with rules

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that should be fair to all. Sport ceases to be ethical when we enter or permit competitions against those who deny opportunity to others. The non-whites forced into segregated sports in South Africa fully backed the boycott, saying that there could be “no normal sport in an abnormal society.” I was convinced we should support them. There were so many horrible stories. In 1965, the self-taught “Indian” golfer Papwa Sewgolum, after several international victories, was allowed to enter the championship of his home state Natal. He won, defeating Gary Player, one of the world’s best golfers at the time. When rain fell during the trophy presentation, the organizers moved it inside but, because of apartheid, left Sewgolum out in the rain. They gave it to him through a window, while Player and the other whites enjoyed their drinks inside. The South African government then banned Sewgolum from all future domestic tournaments and confiscated his passport so he could no longer play internationally. He died impoverished in 1978. The South African National Olympic Committee (SANOC) held to the government position and refused to allow Blacks to enter its trials, let alone send them to the Games, even though some of them were demonstrably the best athletes. The apartheid government forced teams from other countries who played in South Africa to leave their non-white players behind. When the English cricket team insisted on including Black and former South African Basil D’Oliveira on a team heading to South Africa in 1968, the apartheid government cancelled the tour. Repeated efforts to integrate South African sport were unsuccessful, so in 1962 a small group of sportspersons and activists led by the teacher and poet Dennis Brutus formed the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) to put pressure on the apartheid regime through an international sports boycott. The designation “Non-Racial” expressed their commitment to fully inclusive sport. In 1963, Brutus petitioned the IOC



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in Baden-Baden, Germany, to end ties with South Africa. On his return, he was seized, shot, and put in solitary confinement on the notorious Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela. But his efforts were successful – the IOC suspended SANOC from membership and banned it from the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Frustratingly, little of this had any effect in Canada. In the early 1970s, in an effort to circumvent and roll back the international campaign, the white South African sport organizations stepped up their invitations to Canadian athletes and coaches. Many accepted. They found it an attractive opportunity for warm-weather training, in outstanding facilities, all expenses paid. Few knew or cared very much about apartheid. The Olympic swimmer Elaine Tanner told me that she “didn’t know what the problem was, she saw very few Blacks the entire time she was there”! Harry Kerrison, the executive director of the Canadian Track and Field Association, and Maureen O’Bryan, president of the Sports Federation of Canada, took the position that “sport and politics do not mix.” They argued that outsiders should not interfere with the autonomy of Canadian and South African sports officials to make the decisions they thought best. Most Canadian sports leaders and athletes agreed with them and resented the international campaign right up until the end. We discussed apartheid in the dining halls at the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games and the 1964 Olympics. In 1968, when the IOC invited SANOC to the Olympics in Mexico, I cheered when the threat of boycott by the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, the Soviet bloc, and the Olympic Project for Human Rights persuaded the IOC to reverse itself and rescind the invitation. The IOC completely expelled SANOC in 1970. The issues became personal when my brother Ross, after a three-year assignment in Zambia with Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), married Joyce Mwape, a Bemba, and decided to continue his work in community development in

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Swaziland, a small state wholly enclosed by South Africa. Whenever Ross, Joyce, and their two mixed-race infant daughters had to travel, they had to stay overnight in transit at South Africa’s Johannesburg airport. Apartheid law required them to stay in three different rooms. I did not believe that the “autonomy of sport” should override human rights. I also felt strongly that athletes should take responsibility for the conditions of their sport, especially when those conditions had become a worldwide issue. There had been mass protests against South African teams in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and some European countries, so I set out to create a Canadian arm of the international campaign. Initially, supported by Abby Hoffman, I tried to persuade the Ontario governing bodies in swimming and track and field that they should place a moratorium on travel to South Africa. That went nowhere. Our next tack was to appeal to the federal government to use its spending power to pressure the national bodies to end all sporting exchanges with South Africa. That proved frustrating too. Neither Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau nor the diplomats in External Affairs were sympathetic to the Black liberation movements and the idea of South African democracy. In fact, during the Trudeau years, Canadian investment in and trade with South Africa, including the export of Canadian-made arms, increased dramatically. Nevertheless, in 1974, in the face of growing pressure from Canadian churches, trade unions, and student and anti-apartheid organizations, Sport Canada announced that any sports body receiving federal financial assistance had to curtail sporting exchanges with South Africa or lose its funding. Sports minister Marc Lalonde made it happen – he went out of his way to tell me how important it was. What made the policy effective was the sports bodies’ growing dependence upon government financial support.



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Within weeks, most sporting exchanges in the funded sports came to a halt. In 1975, because of South African participation, Sport Canada withdrew $24,000 in funding from a world masters’ athletics meet in Toronto. In 1976, it clawed $500,000 back from the organizing committee for the Olympiad for the Disabled, the forerunner to the Paralympics, also in Toronto. Although I did not like the fact that trade and social relations with South Africa went untouched, I was happy with the results in sports. Without that stick, it would never have happened. I regret to this day that we were unable to persuade Canadian athletes and officials to embrace the boycott voluntarily. It embittered my relations with many of them for years. But I learned that even the most reluctant governments are generally more progressive than the sports community. Despite the lofty moral rhetoric of “fair play” and “a level playing field,” few sports bodies have the interest or capacity to protect human rights.

THE 1976 BOYCOTT In December 1975, the New Zealand rugby union announced that it would send the famed All Blacks men’s rugby team to South Africa for a three-month tour in open defiance of the international campaign. New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon gave the tour his “blessing and goodwill.”1 It would take place at the same time as the Montreal Olympics. The Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA) appealed to the team to stay home, saying that, otherwise, it would call upon the IOC to bar New Zealand from the Games. Failing that, Africa would boycott. The New Zealand anti-apartheid movement and prominent New Zealand athletes such as John Walker joined in these appeals. Walker was the reigning world record holder in the mile and co-favourite for the men’s 1500 in Montreal. The other

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co-favourite was 1500-metre world record holder Filbert Bayi of Tanzania. In a race reminiscent of the Bannister-Landy duel in Vancouver in 1954, the two had battled it out at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, with Bayi leading all the way and holding on for the win. Walker feared that if the tour went ahead, it would knock one of them out of the race. The All Blacks flew to South Africa on June 22, 1976, less than a week after South African police killed 176 Black schoolchildren and injured thousands of others from the Black township of Soweto. The students had been peacefully protesting a decree to eliminate teaching in their own languages and to impose Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) immediately reiterated that if New Zealand were allowed to compete in the Olympics, it would call upon member countries to withdraw their teams from Montreal. Of all the dramas played out in Montreal, the issue of African/ New Zealand participation was the most intense. In the week before the Opening Ceremonies, SCSA president Abraham Ordia (from Nigeria), secretary general Jean-Claude Ganga (from the Congo), and Dennis Brutus (then living in Chicago) and Sam Ramsamy (in London) of SANROC continually pressed the IOC in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel to take some action against the rugby tour. They came from different backgrounds, but each brought important strengths. Ordia was reflective and experienced, Ganga spell-binding and imperial, Brutus determined and charismatic, and Ramsamy strategic and tireless. I spent much of that week engaged with the issue. Activists from around the world met in a downtown church, while in a nearby hotel, South African lobbyists openly campaigned for a return to the Games. In the Olympic Village, the New Zealand track athletes were trying hard to distance themselves from the rugby tour without condemning their own government. It was hard to follow all the plots and rumours.



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My hope was that the IOC or even the IOC member from New Zealand, Lance Cross, would strongly condemn the tour, enabling the SCSA to fashion a face-saving statement that would keep the Africans in the Games. I did not want any of the events diluted. There were already 30 African teams in Montreal with remarkable athletes in the peak of condition. No one budged. The IOC was preoccupied with the issue of whether and how to allow the team from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to compete. The Canadian government had insisted that the IOC honour Canada’s “one China” policy, which only recognized the People’s Republic of China (mainland China). Eventually, the IOC ordered the former to compete as “Taiwan.” It refused and returned home. The skewed IOC membership also distorted its response to Africa. When Pierre de Coubertin established the IOC in 1894, the idea was to appoint one or two new members for every new nation that joined. As the newly independent nations from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean joined after the Second World War, his successors changed their minds. In 1976, there were 45 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in Africa, but only seven IOC members (out of a total IOC membership of 107) from the continent. One of those was a white planter from Kenya, another an unrepentant white representative of the expelled apartheid South Africa. The African IOC members who did speak to Africa’s case were grossly outnumbered. To this day, almost twice as many IOC members come from Europe as any other region. When the IOC refused to address the Africans’ concerns, the OAU declared the boycott. With all the linguistic, religious, political, and cultural differences among African nations, it could have been a disaster. Very few people in Montreal believed that they could pull it off. But Ordia had personally canvassed each country in the weeks leading up to Montreal. Ganga and Ramsamy worked the phones. In a few short hours, they got almost complete

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compliance. When the Opening Ceremonies began at 3 pm that afternoon, 26 African and Arab countries were absent from the athletes’ parade, and two more plus Guyana from South America pulled out the next day. There were tears among the departing athletes but pride that they were standing up for Africa. Although some western reporters disparaged them as government pawns, I know from personal experience that they received a heroes’ welcome back home. Two weeks after the Games, while visiting Ross in Botswana, I gave a public lecture about my impressions of Montreal. When I started to speak about the boycott, the audience rose as one and cheered. They regarded the athletes and coaches who withdrew as soldiers against racism and apartheid. The admiration was palpable. The Montreal boycott proved a significant turning point for the campaign. Within days, the international federations of soccer, swimming, and track and field expelled South Africa from membership. Buoyed with success, Ganga warned that unless the Commonwealth took action against New Zealand, the boycott would remain in force for the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. With the contacts I made in Montreal, I strengthened my links with SANROC and the anti-apartheid activists from other countries, notably the extraordinarily creative and courageous US campaigner Richard Lapchick and the shrewd Trevor Richards from Halt All Racist Tours (HART) in New Zealand. In 1978, Sam Ramsamy became the first salaried SANROC full-time staff member, working out of London. He created an international coordinating committee, called “The International Campaign against Apartheid Sport,” asked me to serve as the Canadian representative, and sent me a box of letterhead and envelopes. Sam and his wife, Helga, became lifelong friends. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, Sam had been a physical educator and swim coach in a college of education, quietly organizing



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non-racial sport. But little escaped the attention of the apartheid authorities. In 1972, his white head of department warned him that the police were looking for him and he fled into exile in the UK. He met Helga, a former national basketball player in the German Democratic Republic, where he won a scholarship to the national sports college at Leipzig. With Helga’s superb organizational skills, Sam quickly became the quarterback of the international campaign. He was continually demonized by the South African and pro-apartheid media. He regularly received death threats, and the couple’s apartment in London was shot up several times. Yet he never backed down or compromised the goal of completely eradicating apartheid. Sam has an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports, a wicked sense of humour, and an infinite capacity for networking, all of which enabled him to develop valuable contacts in many of the key organizations. Then as now, the international federations were opaque and tightly controlled by a few powerful men, usually from Europe. Several federations had voting systems weighted in favour of the western countries. But Sam and Helga worked incessantly to shift the balance of power. They pulled together leaders from the Global South behind single positions so that there was strength in numbers, and recruited progressive westerners to add further votes. Sam got countries that could not attend meetings to designate him as their official representative, so while SANROC had no official role, he had voice and vote at the table. At one time or another, he represented more than 20 countries at international meetings in this way. While he relied on personal contact, he always appealed to principle in his public remarks so that everyone could understand the campaign. I’ve never seen any­one work the front of the room and the back of the room with the same elegance and persistence as Sam and Helga. Whenever they sought to further isolate South Africa or block the constant South African lobbying efforts, they could usually call in the votes.

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SANROC subsisted on small grants from charitable foundations, western governments like Sweden and, in the final days, Canada, and large amounts of volunteer labour. It was just amazing what it accomplished.

EDMONTON AND GLENEAGLES After Montreal, the focus became the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. I asked Jean-Claude Ganga why they would target Canada, which in many ways had been a friend to Africa. “We’re in a war against apartheid and colonialism,” he replied. “When you’re in a war and your commander tells you to destroy a certain building, you don’t stop to tell your friend who lives on the fifth floor to get out of the building. You destroy the building.” The threat of a continuing boycott galvanized the leaders of the Edmonton Organizing Committee, the Trudeau government, and the Commonwealth Secretariat. It was no longer sufficient to show Canadian opposition to apartheid in sport, but to demonstrate the opposition of the entire Commonwealth, including New Zealand. Another African-led boycott would have meant white-only games, a political embarrassment for Canada, a financial disaster for Edmonton, and a troubled future for the Commonwealth. Over the course of the following winter, a flurry of diplomatic activity led to an agreement by Commonwealth prime ministers at their meeting in June of 1977 in the United Kingdom. Member states undertook as an urgent duty vigorously to combat the evil of apartheid by withholding any form of support for and taking every practical step to discourage contact or competition by their nationals with sporting organizations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa.



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Drafted by Commonwealth secretary general Shridath Ramphal, it became known as the Gleneagles Agreement because it was finalized at the Scottish estate of Gleneagles. Canadian prime minister Trudeau played an active role in forging the agreement, but it was Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley, in the bar, who eventually persuaded New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon to sign it. Gleneagles brought the full weight of the Commonwealth against sporting exchanges with South Africa. It gave most ­African governments the confidence that their concerns were being addressed and that they could call off the boycott planned for Edmonton. Lest it unravel in the year before the Games, the ­Canadian government stiffened the visa requirements for South Africans travelling to Canada, closed trade offices in South Africa, and mounted a diplomatic offensive in Africa. In the end, all the Commonwealth countries from the Global South, except Nigeria, Uganda, and Botswana, attended the Games. Edmonton was a great success. Despite Gleneagles, New Zealand invited a South African rugby team to play there in 1981, precipitating such massive protests that the tour had to be cancelled. In response, the Commonwealth Games Federation enacted a constitutional amendment known as the “code of conduct.” It required member associations to monitor and police compliance with Gleneagles by all sports organizations within their respective countries. It turned the tables on critics of the sports boycott. In Montreal, the boycotting teams had been condemned as “disrupters” of sport, and IOC president Lord Killanin proposed that they be penalized. After 1981, the CGF constitution branded those who played with apartheid as “disrupters” and set out penalties for their actions. For me, Gleneagles and the code of conduct transformed the effective basis of the Commonwealth Games. Once the “British Empire Games,” begun and conducted to strengthen ties between the

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remnants of the far-flung British Empire, they have only survived because Britain and the white settler countries have joined with the former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to defeat apartheid and racism. I suggested that the entire raison d’être of the Games, including the symbolism of Opening and Closing Ceremonies, the organization of the athletes’ village, and the Games’ public branding, be updated to reflect the new reality. I suggested we replace the Queen’s Message Relay with a Relay against Racism, and recruit a corps of athletes and coaches to work together to deliver sport programs in those regions most impoverished by colonialism. (Today, I would commission Black Lives Matter and the Indigenous Rights Resistance to design the Opening Ceremonies.) I got nowhere. Despite its grudging acceptance of the code of conduct, the Commonwealth Games Federation was rooted in the past. In Canada, as the ideologies of high performance and “sport for sport’s sake” increasingly took hold, there was very little interest in the Commonwealth experiment, let alone a different approach to the symbolism of major games. Most athletes regard the Commonwealth Games as just another international competition. One powerful source of resistance to the sports boycott was Canadian experience with the US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. In late 1979, the Soviet government sent troops into Afghanistan to prop up the beleaguered, murderous Communist government of that country. US president Jimmy Carter denounced the Soviet military aid as an “invasion” and appealed to the IOC to cancel or move the Games. The IOC refused. Carter then initiated a boycott of the Moscow Games. Despite the overwhelming desire of Canadian athletes to compete, the Canadian Olympic Association’s corporate sponsors withdrew their funding. The Canadian government knuckled under US pressure and forced the COA to keep the team at home. It was a bitter pill to swallow for Canadian athletes, many of whom were at the



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height of their careers. Although 66 western National Olympic Committees stayed home from Moscow, Carter’s boycott had no effect upon the Soviet government or the outcome of the war. That led to the strong belief among athletes that “sports boycotts don’t work.” Abby Hoffman and I strongly opposed the 1980 Olympic boycott. We were at pains to distinguish it from the anti-apartheid campaign. The Carter boycott, we felt, was prompted by an invasion over which the sports community had absolutely no control. The anti-apartheid boycott was motivated by terrible abuses in the world of sport, which the international sport community had a responsibility to correct. As much as possible, I tried to educate the athletes and coaches I knew about the implications of the anti-apartheid campaign. As chair of the Olympic Academy of Canada, a week-long residential leadership development workshop for athletes and young sports leaders, I invited Sam to give the keynote address. I regularly asked External Affairs to conduct an educational campaign about the importance of the sports boycott. There was little interest. The failure to win any traction among Canadian athletes became painfully clear in 1986, when the Commonwealth Games were held in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the weeks before, African leaders pressed British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to do something to demonstrate compliance with Gleneagles, i.e., discourage the flow of British athletes to South Africa and vice versa, as Canada and Australia had done. With the vocal support of US president Ronald Reagan, she refused. Reluctantly, the OAU put out the call for a Games boycott. I called upon Canadian athletes to walk out in solidarity. Three Canadian high commissioners in Africa also recommended that Canada stay home. For several days, it looked as if the Canadian government might agree. But the Commonwealth Games Association of Canada and Canadian athletes were having

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none of it. Distance runners Lynn Williams and Paul Williams, a former student, told reporters that athletes would commit every form of civil disobedience imaginable if anyone ordered them to leave the Games.2 In the end, Canada stayed, along with 25 other teams, principally those from Australia, New Zealand, British colonies like the Falkland Islands and Hong Kong, and the seven components of the UK that competed as separate teams – England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey. Thirty-two nations from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean withdrew or stayed home. It was the Commonwealth’s worst nightmare: a largely white Games. Following Edmonton, the Trudeau government seemed to lose interest in combatting apartheid and even supporting Canadian sport. To the chagrin of sports minister Iona Campagnolo, who had lobbied hard for economic as well as sports sanctions, the government reopened trade offices in South Africa, tried to discourage the United Nations from developing a Gleneagles-like treaty, and slashed Sport Canada’s budget. There was little cooperation between Sport Canada and External Affairs. Working closely with Sam, I focused my efforts on closing the loopholes in Canadian policy. The government claimed that Gleneagles did not cover professional athletes in sports like tennis and golf, or sporting exchanges between Canadian and South African athletes in third countries. Its justification was that professional athletes were not “representative” of their countries but merely private businesspersons. Nothing was further from the truth, as any reading of Gleneagles would attest. The apartheid government shamelessly exploited this loophole, subsidizing their athletes’ travel, while boasting that every single athlete competing abroad “stood for South Africa.” When the rationalizations continued after the election of Brian Mulroney as prime minister in 1984, I began to call it the “Mulroney loophole.”



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I pressed every single external and sport minister who held office during the 1970s and 1980s on the absurdity of the Canadian position, appealed to the athletes and sports bodies that continued relations with South Africa, and took advantage of every opportunity to embarrass them in the media. I also contributed to updates of the twice-yearly UN Register of Sports Contacts with South Africa. Behind the scenes, Abby, who became director general of Sport Canada in 1981, quietly directed sports bodies to withdraw from competitions abroad where South Africans were entered. At the 1987 Canadian Open Golf Championship at Glen Abbey in Oakville, Ontario, where several South Africans and other “sanction breakers” were playing, John Saul of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa, my wife, Phyllis, and I led a noisy demonstration. The 18th hole was just a few metres from Glen Abbey’s fence. We certainly got their attention. One welcome change came in 1988. The Conservative minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, was personally supportive of the role that sport could play. That summer, several South Africans were expected to play in the Canadian tennis championship at York University, at the very time that a Commonwealth foreign ministers’ meeting was to take place in Toronto. We pressured everyone involved. On the eve of the championship, Clark and sports minister Jean Charest announced that they had closed the “Mulroney loophole” and henceforth would deny visas to all those South Africans seeking to enter Canada for the purposes of sport.

THE END OF APARTHEID By the late 1980s, the end of apartheid was in sight. In 1988, combined Angolan, Cuban, and Namibian armies defeated the South African Defence Force at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, forcing it to retreat behind its own borders. It could no longer

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wreak havoc among the front-line states. Namibia gained its independence from South Africa. Economic sanctions by the European Union and the United States (with Congress overriding the veto of President Reagan) and broadly supported divestment campaigns in other countries brought the message home to thousands of whites. There were no more official exchanges in any sport. The last attempted tours by New Zealand and British rugby teams were cancelled in 1985. Mass protests forced the last “rebel cricket” tour (made up of retired and end-of-career players who had nothing to lose from expulsion) to flee South Africa prematurely in January 1990. The circle was closing. The white sports establishment reached out to the African National Congress and SANROC in 1988. Early in 1990, the South African government lifted the ban on the ANC, released Nelson Mandela from prison, and began negotiations for the end of apartheid and the creation of multi-racial democracy. These breath-taking, heart-rending developments both cheered and worried the anti-apartheid movements. As support groups, we were committed to taking our lead from the Black anti-apartheid leaders who were negotiating with their white counterparts in Harare, Lusaka, Pretoria, and other capitals. On the other hand, we were deeply invested in the outcomes. Along with other western activists, I was concerned that if legal barriers to integrated sport were eliminated but nothing was done to address the grotesque inequalities facing Blacks in sports and South African society generally, very little would change. Whites would continue to dominate South African sports. I was also concerned that the ANC leadership would use sports as a diplomatic card, the way that regularly happened in Canada. There was tremendous pressure from the white South African sports bodies, the International Olympic Committee, the international sports federations, and corporate marketing interests to bring the boycott to an end. IOC president Juan Antonio



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Samaranch stated that as soon as apartheid legislation was abolished, he hoped that there would be a South African team at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, his hometown. The non-racial sports movement within South Africa was divided, with the older generation committed to maintaining the boycott while the younger generation wanted international opportunities immediately. Sam, Jean-Claude Ganga (representing the African Olympic Committees), the non-racial South African sports leaders, and the ANC were caught in the middle of these conflicting demands. They saw the opportunities and were sensitive to the younger leaders’ ambitions. At the same time, they knew that boycott was the only weapon they had; if they relinquished it, they could never resurrect it. They worried about how long they could maintain it. Their traditional allies in the Soviet bloc who had given them muscle on so many occasions were disappearing from the historical stage. “It’s like jumping on the back of a tiger,” Sam told me. “If you can steer it, you can cover a lot of ground in a very short time; but if it throws you off, you’ll be the first to be eaten!” In August 1990, Sam returned to South Africa to give leadership to the negotiations – the first time he had gone home in more than 18 years. Helga joined him there soon afterwards. At an international conference in Stockholm in September 1990, at which all the major players were present, activists focused on the conditions that had to be realized before the boycott would be dismantled. We felt that the complete eradication of apartheid, the establishment of completely integrated, non-racial, and non-sexist national sports organizations, and a significant redistribution of resources into non-racial sports were essential. We committed to maintaining the international campaign until those conditions were met. I gave a paper on the need for western countries to help develop sports in the Black communities and the front-line states, ideas that would provide the basis for the sport-for-development initiatives I outline in chapter 23.

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Events moved very quickly after that. In 1991, the legislation considered the “pillars” of apartheid was abolished. With the support of the African Olympic Committees, Sam put together a new, integrated National Olympic Committee for South Africa (NOCSA) recognized by the IOC. He told the media that he thought NOCSA needed until the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to create the conditions for a truly representative team. It would not be until 1994 that the first democratic elections were held and Nelson Mandela became president. The pressures to send a team to Barcelona were relentless. Even the ANC leaned on Sam to put together a South African Olympic Team in the interests of “transformation.” After a difficult debate, NOCSA agreed. That decision just intensified the debate. On the left, activists said it was premature. On the right, the unrepentant white nationalists insisted that the team be selected based on historic performances, which would mean that 95 per cent of the athletes would be white, march behind the old flag, and play the apartheid anthem. It took an enormous effort for Sam and NOCSA to create a team with significant Black representation and a neutral flag and anthem (Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”). Against those in the media who said that South Africa was returning to the Olympic Games, I always said that “for the first time ever, non-racial South Africa is competing in the Olympics.” I have a great deal of respect for activists who move into leadership, struggle to effect small reforms, and put them in the best light for their own members and the public. That’s the challenge that the non-racial sports leaders in South Africa face to this day. The ANC government has tried very hard to ensure that South Africa is represented abroad by multi-racial teams and that sport-fordevelopment takes place in the townships. But at every step, the legacies of apartheid, especially the spatial segregation of housing, schools, and playing areas, confound those efforts. The liberal capitalism that replaced the state-driven capitalism of apartheid has



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further increased the grotesque disparities in income, although there is now a Black middle class. These circumstances continue to complicate the creation of genuinely democratic sports. As just one example, there are excellent facilities, coaching, and competitive opportunities in the traditional white municipalities, private schools, and clubs, but most in the Black townships are primitive, if they exist at all. Busing ventures have been tried, but very few Black parents are willing or able to send their sports-loving children to the good opportunities. Moreover, South African sport is still male-dominated. I regret that the international campaign was unable to do more to transform the socio-economic structures of South African sport before we closed up shop. While the sports boycott did not single-handedly end apartheid, it played a huge role in bringing home the world’s intractable opposition to millions of South African sports fans, forcing the white sports bodies to sue for peace. The leaders of the new South ­Africa have repeatedly gone out of their way to thank the activists who led the campaign in various countries, as I was in 1993, when Phyllis and I were invited to help NOCSA establish a South ­African Olympic Academy. The campaign forced the International Olympic Committee, the Commonwealth Games Federation, and the international federations to acknowledge human rights, recognition that paved the way for subsequent campaigns for women’s opportunities and, most recently, protections against discrimination of sexual minorities. It also consolidated African participation in the Olympic Movement. In Montreal, in the days immediately after the African walkout, Chinese representatives raised the possibility of a 1980 counter-Olympics in Beijing for countries from the Global South, along the lines of the 1963 Games of the Emerging Forces in ­Jakarta, Indonesia. One of the Chinese leaders taunted me about whether I would prefer to be in Beijing or at “the racist IOC’s

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Olympics in the corrupt Soviet Union.” But shortly after Montreal, the IOC stepped up its active support for the anti-apartheid campaign and Africa stayed. In 1978, under new political leadership, China joined the IOC. These decisions prevented a worldwide split in Olympic sports. In Africa’s case, I’ve always felt that one of the reasons was the opportunity the anti-apartheid campaign gave it to refashion the Olympics as genuinely non-racial. It was the “boycott that worked.”

18 FEMINIST ALLY

Of all the struggles for inclusion and fairness in modern sports, the feminist cause is the most important and the most difficult. The most important because if the promise of “sports for all” is to be realized, the diverse half of the world’s population that is girls and women must enjoy accessible opportunities comparable in quality to those enjoyed by boys and men. They must fully participate in decisions and leadership. It is the most difficult because gender equity requires the profound transformation of sport itself – ­from a culture of masculine socialization and privileging to one affirming and enhancing all of our humanity. The dazzling performances of the very best women athletes in every sport imaginable often lead us to forget the extent to which sports remain a culture of masculinity. But the evidence is there for all to see in the fierce resistance to women as leaders, the grotesque disparities in prize money, the billions in public subsidies for what I call “men’s cultural centres” – the ­­­ stadia and arenas devoted to men’s sport – ­while women’s shelters and other programs for women go underfunded. The mass media, even public broadcasters like the CBC, “symbolically annihilate” women athletes from their coverage. In their nineteenth-century origins, modern sports were explicitly created as a male preserve, shoring up the culture of men and

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reinforcing male privilege, at a time when traditional male roles were discombobulated by rapid industrialization and urbanization. In the 1920s, when the “first wave” of Canadian female sports leaders courageously organized sporting opportunities for girls and women, creating their own clubs, leagues, rules, and championships, media said they were “invading” sports. Girls and women enjoy better opportunities today, but equity in the resources, leadership, and media coverage is still a distant goal. As I reread the proceedings of the major conferences and task forces in which I have participated, I see limited progress on the fundamental challenges. The recommendations of the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Work Group on Girls and Women in Sport in 2018 are very similar to those of the National Conference on Women and Sport in Toronto in 1974. No other major sphere of society remains as patriarchal as sport. I learned to respect girls and women at home. My mother was a tower of strength in the family and community, and my aunts and sisters were accomplished and adventurous. My aunt Dora cycled from Toronto to Vancouver in 1926, transporting a bulky sleeping roll and a cast-iron frying pan, long before the Trans Canada Highway. She preferred the mountains to the prairies because there was no mud. Even with these influences, I did not question the view that sports were a male preserve until I gave up organized baseball and hockey for track. There were outstanding female athletes in the East York Track Club. Women competed in all the meets. Although they had far fewer events, they trained and raced as hard as or harder than we did, and their performances were as exciting to watch. It was clear that they belonged in sports. It was also clear that they encountered all sorts of obstacles men didn’t, from the limited number of opportunities to everyday training conditions. High school and university competition didn’t exist; it was still in the future. Women’s track events stopped



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at 880  yards (and that distance had only been re-introduced in 1960). Triple jump, pole vault, and hammer were prohibited. While we usually enjoyed dressing rooms and showers, women rarely did; if they could change at all, it was in public washrooms, someone’s car, or behind a tree. I think witnessing this two-tiered system was my first realization that the treatment of women in sports was unfair and could not be justified. I have always depended upon a hot shower for recovery after a workout or race (and sometimes even before a race on a cold day). It was shocking to see female teammates forced to go without. Most female athletes I knew bent my ear about the double standard, but Abby Hoffman was public about it. Barred from hockey, Abby took up swimming and then track. By 1962, at the age of 15, she was the dominant middle distance runner in Canada and a member of the Canadian team competing in the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth. During her exemplary career, she won Commonwealth and Pan American championships, twice reached the Olympic final of the 800 metres, and set countless records. She represented Canada on four consecutive Olympic teams. Her thrilling races won her headlines and fans everywhere. By the time of the 1964 Olympics, we had become close friends and allies. For a time in the 1970s, we lived in the same building (in different apartments with different partners). Like me, Abby took advantage of her celebrity to argue for more accessible, democratic, and professionally organized Canadian sport. She was articulate and eloquent, with an acerbic wit. Once I was congratulating her after she won a race in High Park. A well-dressed woman came up to us and sternly told her that if she kept up running she would “destroy her uterus and not be able to have babies.” “Can I patent that?” Abby immediately replied. Through her mother, Dorothy Medhurst, Abby had a confident sense of the accomplishments of first-wave feminism, and she was determined to forge something even better. It was hard not to admire her and think about what she said.

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I once asked a group of distinguished sportswomen who had the greatest influence on their participation in sports. They all said “Abby Hoffman.” Another early teammate-teacher was Marion Lay. Marion was a world record holder, Olympic medallist, and Commonwealth champion in freestyle swimming. She has been a tireless advocate, conscience, and organizer all her life. I once invited her to give a talk to a faculty meeting at U of T. She was reasoned and comprehensive, never raising her voice, yet several senior male colleagues responded angrily, telling me afterwards that she was “man-hating and shrill.” Marion calmly deflected the attacks, spoke to those in the room who were open to her ideas, and left with several new supporters. She was a master at identifying friends, empowering them, and building networks and alliances. Along with Abby and figure skater Petra Burka, she organized the first national women and sport conference in 1974. She created the first federal W ­ omen’s Program in 1980, drafted many national and provincial equity policies, and helped establish the leading non-governmental organizations, including the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport (CAAWS, now Canadian Women and Sport), WomenSport International, and in BC, ProMOTION Plus. I have had many other tour guides to the deeply rooted inequalities and the possibilities for reform in sports, including Betty Baxter, Varda Burstyn, Guylaine Demers, Helen Gurney, Ann Hall, Liz Hoffman, Judy Kent, Dorothy Kidd, Jill Leclair, Helen Lenskyj, Geneviève Rail, Laura Robinson, and Dorothy Strachan. My feminist muse for the last 35 years has been Phyllis Berck. Born and raised in Winnipeg, she moved to Calgary to work for the National Film Board, and then joined the Calgary Winter Olympic Organizing Committee. We met in Montreal at an Olympic Academy, and fell in love during many adventures in the Rockies. We were married at Lake Louise in 1988. Phyllis has been a lifelong advocate for women and women in sport, chairing the Women’s



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Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and CAAWS. At the City of Toronto, she introduced many reforms to Parks and Recreation, including compulsory ice time for women’s hockey, proactive women’s sports programs, and equity audits. A multi-sport athlete, she has become an accomplished marathon runner, so I accompany her around the world to races. During the 1960s and 1970s, Canadian girls and women were dauntless and exuberant in pushing for more opportunities. Inspiration came from the transformative ambitions of the women’s liberation movement, the dazzling performances of Canadian women in international competition, and the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, published in 1970, which called for governments to ensure equal opportunities in athletic and sports activities. Yet many public authorities and sports organizations dragged their heels, refusing to open facilities and keeping budgets low. That’s when I first joined the cause. In 1974, Abby and other women called upon Toronto Parks and Recreation to provide equal opportunities for girls and women. Commissioner Ivan Forrest wrote Council that the city had no obligation to provide special treatment to “designated groups,” and that most girls and women preferred non-physical recreation like crafts anyway. I knew Forrest and went to see him to argue for a change in policy. Sadly, he didn’t budge. I had more success when the Toronto school board upheld a ban on the girl’s triple jump, fearing that it would so damage the uterus that it would render participants infertile. After a review of the literature showed no such evidence, I persuaded Bob Gladish, the director of physical education, to include the event in the board’s program. In 1983, the task force I chaired on amateur boxing in Ontario recommended the abolition of the legal prohibitions against women boxing. Supporting feminists was rarely straightforward. Sportswomen differed significantly on the way ahead, and, of course, racialized

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and Indigenous women and women with disabilities faced very different challenges from the largely middle-class white women who dominated Canadian sports. While lesbian, bisexual, and trans women played and often excelled at sports, they faced such discrimination that many chose to stay in the closet. When I voiced the uncompromising views I had learned from Abby, Marion, or the women in the Waffle, many other women objected. The deepest fault lines lay between those who sought to participate/create opportunities in the same way as for boys and men, in integrated organizations, and those who wanted to grow distinct women’s programs in separate women’s organizations. Most experienced female leaders feared that integration would cost women jobs and influence. They were critical of the hyper-competitive approach of men’s sport and sought to provide more educationally focused, less intensive opportunities. Many sportswomen did not identify with the larger women’s movement, feeling that just being in sport made them a target for misogynist, even lesbophobic criticism. They felt they didn’t need any more challenges. Mainstream feminists took little interest in sports. Sadly, to this day, there are few links of solidarity. I learned to take the lead from the women in the room, to be an ally, not an advocate in my own right. It was a rule I did not always follow and sometimes that got me into trouble. On the other hand, some women preferred it when I threw their snowballs and were cross with me when I didn’t. I learned to proceed cautiously. The first generation of women’s sports leaders in Canada, women like Alexandrine Gibb, Mabel Ray, and Irene Moore McInnis of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada (WAAF), whom I got to know, sought to create “girls sports run by girls,” with female-determined rules and female-led organizations and activities. It was a time of “separate sphere” feminism. Their achievement was the creation of women-led physical education and athletic departments in most schools and universities. Their



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programs were woefully underfunded, with inferior facilities. They faced constant ridicule. Yet even in those difficult circumstances, the women’s leaders managed to provide opportunities for female coaches, administrators, and officials and memorable programs for their students. They controlled the direction of their sports. In the early 1970s, as younger women called for integration as a step towards equality, the heads of those women-only departments and programs countered that integration would force out their female colleagues, swamp their carefully won facilities with male students, and change the character of programs. At the time, I had little patience with their concerns. I felt that they were out of touch with my teammates and friends who wanted to be much more competitive. In 1973, while estimating student needs in a planned new athletic building, I was shocked when Anne Hewett, the women’s athletic director, requested half the facility time sought by the men. Anne felt that she could provide better-quality experiences with fewer games. I used my influence on the task force that was considering the future of U of T athletics to push for an integrated department. It was established in 1974. Similar integrations occurred at most universities in Canada and the United States. Yet almost immediately, the worst fears of the separate-sphere advocates came to pass. While the new departments rapidly expanded the number of opportunities for female athletes, they gave most of the resources and jobs to men. In 1982, Ann Hall and Dorothy Richardson estimated that the percentage of female coaches in Canadian interuniversity sports fell from approximately 40 per cent in the days of separate departments to 20 per cent ­after integration, while the percentage of male coaches employed increased by 137 per cent. Where integration occurred, not a single woman headed the combined unit. In 2015, a time when women had become the overwhelming majority of students on most campuses, Peter Donnelly, Mark Norman, and I found that the

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percentage of female coaches and athletic directors in ­Canadian university sport was still very low, 17 per cent and 24 per cent respectively. Little has changed in the last five years. Outside the universities, Hall and Richardson found that women held only 13 per cent of the national coaching positions and about the same percentages of boards and professional positions. It’s not much better today. Only 16.5 per cent of the Canadian Olympic coaches in Rio and 9.2 per cent of the coaches in PyeongChang were female. In 2018, only 39 per cent of organizational leaders and 34 per cent of board members of the national sports bodies were female. I deeply regret that I did not do anything to protect women’s jobs during the rush to integrated administration in the 1970s. It was a huge mistake, effectively barring an entire generation of Canadian sportswomen from leadership. During the 1970s and 1980s, frustrated by the inferior opportunities they experienced in women’s sports, many young women sought access to the superior opportunities enjoyed by boys and men, even if it meant playing on male teams. When the men’s organizations turned them down, they filed sex discrimination complaints with their provincial human rights commissions. By the early 1980s, more than 50 young women across Canada had entered such appeals. In Nova Scotia and Quebec, the protesting women won the right to play hockey at the highest level, i.e., with the men, thereby opening the doors for other young women to do the same. Ontario proved a stumbling block. When the Ontario Human Rights Commission declared that women’s exclusion from the best opportunities was indeed sex discrimination, the courts ruled that the human rights legislation did not apply to amateur sport. Along with others, I pressed the Ontario government and my friends in the provincial ministry to revise the legislation, but they only amended it to strengthen the exemption. I was livid and weighed in as often as I could, presenting a formal brief to the



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legislature, pestering (future Supreme Court justice) John Sopinka, who was appointed to report on the issue, and challenging the sports bodies that claimed the right to discriminate. We got nowhere. Despite the growing government support for sport, sports leaders claimed they were not subject to human rights. Their resistance was another expression of the deeply rooted belief that sport is a private sphere, even when it uses public facilities and its funds come from government. It was a courageous young athlete and a brilliant lawyer who forced the change in Ontario. Twelve-year-old Justine Blainey could skate circles around her older brother David, yet his team enjoyed many more games than hers, at more convenient times, and provided far better equipment and financial support. Justine wanted to play on a comparable team in the boys’ association. She also wanted to body check and make slap shots the way they could in boys’ hockey. She was personable and articulate. While the hockey establishment bitterly resisted and conservative women condemned her, Justine quickly won over the media. I joined her advocacy team. In 1986, with the support of CAAWS and LEAF and the authority of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Blainey and her lawyer, Mary Eberts (with whom I had written a book on athletes’ rights), persuaded the Ontario Court of Appeal to strike down the discriminatory provisions of the Ontario Human Rights Code. The decision enabled her (and other women who could make teams because of ability) to play in the previously all-male Ontario Hockey Association, while protecting women’s sports (as historically disadvantaged) from unwanted incursions from less gifted boys and men. It was a huge breakthrough. Not every woman wanted to play in men’s sports, however, or had the time or resources to appeal to human rights bodies to bring about change. There had to be a better way. After Abby became director general of Sport Canada, she and Marion sought to embed

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protective policies and programs in the day-to-day operations of governments and sports bodies. They created the Sport Canada Women’s Program to fund new initiatives, including internships for recently retired female athletes who wanted to become coaches and administrators. In 1986, Sport Canada tried to impose equity policies on the sports bodies as a requirement for funding. Most sports bodies dragged their feet, claiming that the equity requirements diverted them from their primary goal of winning medals at international competitions. This issue festers to this day. Whenever it suits them, the sports bodies claim to act in the public interest and deserve to receive public funds. Some of them draw almost 100 per cent of their revenues from government. Yet when governments ask them to comply with human rights legislation, and equity, language, financial transparency, and other public policies, they claim the “autonomy of sports” and that the requirements should not apply. While governments want the sports bodies to further public objectives, they are reluctant to push too hard. They share the priority of the podium, do not want to be seen as “taking over sport,” and are not prepared to make the investments that would really enable them to set tough conditions. Even where human rights legislation and equity policies exist, governments rarely monitor compliance, let alone enforce it. I became directly involved in the process of creating and implementing equity policies in sports at the University of Toronto in the early 1990s. By then, I was director of the School of Physical and Health Education, with a significant role in athletic decisions. The director sat on the governing body of the Department of Athletics and Recreation (DAR) and its major committees. A perfect storm of crises buffeted DAR. Drastic cuts to provincial funding led the university to eliminate all funding for athletic programs, forcing staff layoffs, sharply increased student fees, and a proposal to reduce the number of intercollegiate teams. Those decisions exacerbated gender tensions. While women had become



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56 per cent of the student body, women’s sports only received 34 per cent of the intercollegiate budget. Professor Rona Abramovitch, the university’s status of women officer, took up their case at the board that approved the athletic budget, demanding that DAR’s operations be frozen until the inequities were addressed. The board agreed. It was chaos. I tried to cool everyone down and use the swirling crises to build a consensus for reform. I helped mediate a reconsideration of the policy on intercollegiate sports and persuaded the Department to appoint a special task force to address gender issues. Rona agreed to suspend her objections until we reported. The Gender Equity Task Force was one of the most ambitious, thought-provoking exercises in which I have ever participated. Our charge was to examine the availability, quality, scheduling, and cost of opportunities on a gender basis and the extent of gender equity in leadership, governance, and employment. We consulted far and wide, conducted safety and communications audits, and obtained a legal opinion on the new interpretations of equity that had emerged from judicial decisions arising from the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Every major point of analysis or recommendation provoked lengthy, sometimes acrimonious debate. Meetings scheduled for two hours went on for six. The most eye-opening experience for me was the facilities audit. Susan Addario, the university’s safety officer, led us through every playing space, corridor, and meeting and dressing room, outlining concerns and inviting comments. It was upsetting to hear how these spaces evoked fear among the women I accompanied, many of whom were confident, accomplished athletes and coaches. I had comfortably spent my life in these buildings. I had even helped design the Athletic and Physical Education Centre (AC), never thinking for a moment about how the long patriarchal history of sports was expressed in its design, lighting, and signage.

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The Task Force hammered out our own definition of what we sought in athletics: Whereas EQUALITY means treating people the same, EQUITY means treating persons in ways that are fair. Therefore, GENDER EQUITY means treating the Genders in ways that are FAIR.1

We established equity principles that recognized historic and current unfairness and applied a gender lens to all decisions. We recommended major renovations to the facilities, equal funding envelopes for men’s and women’s sports, gender parity in governance, pay equity for staff, women’s-only hours in the pool and the weight room, free sanitary products in women’s washrooms, changes to communications, and further study to consider child care, ethno-cultural inclusion, and sexual diversity. The debate over funding was instructive. While the majority quickly coalesced around 50:50, several students argued for proportionality, so that if the student body was 56 per cent female, the women’s envelope would receive 56 per cent of the budget. When the recommendations were presented to the athletics council, the old guard clung to the male-privileging status quo, arguing that 50:50 was too radical. We could say that it was the compromise. When I subsequently became athletic director, a process I will recount in a later chapter, implementing the gender equity recommendations became my overarching priority. It took us four years to equalize the envelopes for men’s and women’s athletics. When we managed the first two years with new money, we were heroes, but when we had to take the last two steps by reducing the men’s budgets, the tensions exploded. I once overheard the men’s basketball coach telling a friend, “When I hear the words ‘gender equity,’ I go for my gun!” The resistance was particularly fierce in the weight room, where we had instituted women’s-only hours in prime time every day. Although we conducted an



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ambitious educational campaign to justify the women’s-only hours and change the masculinist culture, the minute it concluded, the bullying of women resumed. The lesson was that equity initiatives need to be ongoing and continually refreshed in consultation with those affected. It was also difficult to change concrete and steel to give women the equal dressing rooms they deserved. But we persevered. The entire experience gave me the confidence to become an even stronger ally. In the years since, I’ve taken the insights and arguments I learned there to my work as a policy advisor for the federal and Ontario sports ministers, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Canadian and International Olympic Committees, and the Commonwealth Games Federation. The current agenda for gender equity is frustratingly familiar. Even where there are progressive policies, compliance is hit and miss. In fact, the yawning gap between policy and actual implementation was the most frequent response to a pan-Canadian survey conducted by CAAWS in 2018 as part of the work of a federal-provincial-territorial work group I co-chaired with Guylaine Demers of Laval. If governments only held the sports bodies they fund to the long-established policy requirements, rewarding those who equitably engage women and penalizing those who fail, the face of Canadian sport would quickly change. But it hasn’t. For this reason, I have become convinced that quotas in leadership positions and proactive recruitment and mentoring for women coaches and leaders are long overdue. The scourge of gender-based violence (GBV) and other forms of maltreatment in Canadian sports is another urgent issue. Sexual harassment by prominent coaches and officials has long been a “public secret,” with woman athletes and coaches warning others to be on the defensive. Researchers such as Gretchen Kerr of the University of Toronto, Sandi Kirby of the University of Winnipeg, and Sylvie Parent of Laval have documented it extensively.

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In the early 1990s, AthletesCAN, the association of national team athletes, called for a completely independent new agency to hear and investigate complaints. Instead, in 1996, Sport Canada put the onus on the national sports bodies to address it. Only a small fraction of them ever complied. With #MeToo, #TimesUp, the high-profile criminal trials of former Canadian ski coach Bertrand Charest, US gymnastics physician Larry Nasser, and others in almost every sport, ending GBV is a priority once again. I have joined AthletesCAN, prominent researchers, Canadian Women and Sport, and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports in calling upon the federal government to create and fund a new mechanism, completely independent of sports bodies and Sport Canada, to address GBV and other forms of maltreatment, including non-sexual physical and psychological abuse and neglect. Sport Canada has developed a comprehensive new code of conduct and agreed to fund a new agency to enforce it. At the time of writing, it is unclear how it will actually work, but there’s a broad consensus that change is urgently needed. The other issue in which I continue to be involved is the campaign to abolish the sex test. For almost as long as women have participated in international sports, governing bodies have questioned whether the best athletes are “really women.” It’s another legacy of the deeply rooted belief that women have no place in sports. The test has been used to exclude exceptional athletes who do not conform to the western ideal of “femininity.” When I was running in the 1960s, officials targeted the female champions from the Soviet Union and its allies; more recently, it’s been women from the Global South. In soccer, where there is still “gender verification” at the international level, a FIFA official told me that sports bodies in Africa use it to keep lesbians out of the sport. For decades, every single woman athlete at the Olympics was tested before her event, an experience of considerable stress. In 1999, after an international campaign, the IOC abolished the



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universal test, but the governing bodies reserved the right to examine “abnormal” athletes on a targeted basis. In 2011, in response to the triumph of South African sprinter Caster Semenya at the 2009 world championships in Berlin, the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics) introduced a new test that prohibited athletes possessing more than 10 nanomols per litre of natural testosterone. The IOC adopted a similar “hyperandrogenism regulation” for the London Olympics in 2012. The new test was motivated entirely by the moral panic emanating from the fear of talented Black women like Semenya. There was neither scientific nor ethical justification. The IAAF followed none of the procedures that the World Anti-Doping Agency, the World Health Organization, and other international bodies have established for science-based policies, such as independent peer review, standards of evidence, and consultation with the affected athletes and ethicists. It’s another troubling case of powerful sports bodies claiming “the autonomy of sport” to do whatever they want. Paul Melia of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport has said that it could never be administered in Canada because it violates federal and provincial human rights laws. Because it can be triggered by a look or a complaint, the new test has created an enormous chill among female athletes in every country in the world. But it has had its most serious impact upon women from the Global South. As Human Rights Watch has documented, the test has forced numerous athletes out of their sports, ending their livelihoods, and, in four documented cases, compelled healthy athletes to undergo medically unnecessary, life-changing, unalterable surgery. It has been condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Medical Association, and many scientific associations. But the sports bodies persist. The first woman to be suspended under the 2011 test was Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, just before the 2014 Commonwealth

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Games. When the news of her test was leaked to the media, Indian researcher Payoshni Mitra reached out to Chand, asking if she wanted to fight back. Chand did. Payoshni immediately emailed US colleague Katrina Karkazis, who emailed me. At that very moment, I was at the meeting of the Commonwealth Sports Ministers in Glasgow (as a member of the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport), sitting right behind the Indian delegation. I felt that one way to overturn the sex test would be to challenge it at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, international sport’s supreme court. I immediately approached the Indians and asked them if they would support a test case at CAS. At the morning coffee break, they were reluctant. At lunch, they said they were considering it, and during the afternoon tea break, told me that if I could help them find a suitable lawyer, they would agree to it. That’s exactly what happened. With the moral and financial support of the Sports Authority of India and the expert testimony of Karkazis, Melia, Mitra, and others, the Toronto legal pair of James Bunting and Carlos Sayao helped Chand overturn the IAAF regulation in 2015. She competed at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. The ruling enabled Semenya to win another Olympic championship. To my dismay, the IAAF came back with a rule that sets natural testosterone limits for the five events Semenya runs. CAS upheld that policy. Even though it acknowledged that World Athletics violates her human rights, CAS said that it has no power to force sports bodies to respect those rights. It is painfully clear that athletes need a binding, independent mechanism in international sports to protect and enforce their rights. Sports bodies should abolish gender policing once and for all. They should respect the essential right of gender self-identity, which is fundamental to the ideal of self-expression that is the basis of sport. Women’s rights are human rights. Sports bodies should protect them.

19 RECOVERY PROJECTS

I’ve lived my life within a changing landscape of lived experience and understood history. Both shape my interpretation of societies and the possibilities for change. Both inspire me to study more. In the case of sports, the unknowns of history have led me to conduct my own research and advocate for a more comprehensive sports history in schools and the media. I feel it is impossible to describe contemporary societies accurately without some account of sports. Yet mainstream historians rarely mention sports. Even those who write about them only refer to the top tier of a narrow monoculture of men’s sports. During the Centennial celebrations of 1967, there was an outpouring of commemorative sports books and television shows, but the focus was upon major championships and successful athletes. Very little was said about the role of sports in the creation and workings of Canadian society. It was during the 1960s and 1970s that I gradually realized there was something lacking in what passed for sports history. As I travelled for track and field, engaged in the politics of sports, and began to write critically about some of the issues, I was always discovering precedents, ideas, and personalities that I wished I had known about earlier. The political economy I learned always drew

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upon history. I was determined to broaden my understanding whenever I could. My appointment to the School of Physical and Health Education gave me the opportunity. While my priority was sports policy, I began researching sport history and teaching a course on the history of Canadian sport and physical education. I joined the North American Society of Sport History, one of the very first learned societies to deal with sport, and enrolled in the history program at York University. Going to York was a chance to get a PhD. I had been hired with a master’s degree, in the last rush of such appointments in the early 1970s, and was under no obligation to get the further degree. Yet the doctorate was becoming a basic requirement across the academy and I felt I should have one. It promised to be a long haul, because York made me take a second master’s degree before entering the doctoral program, so I didn’t tell anyone, even after I received tenure. My time at York was one of the highlights of my intellectual life. The history department boasted an accomplished faculty, including Irving Abella, Christopher Armstrong, Ramsay Cook, Jack Granatstein, Craig Heron, Susan Houston, Michael Kater, Viv Nelles, and Jack Saywell, and an exceptional cohort of fellow students, including Ruth Brower, Franca Iacovetta, Varpu Lindstrom, and Ian Radforth. Everyone supported my desire to write about sports. There was a heady spirit of social history, the ambition to push understanding beyond parliaments, dates, and powerful white, male leaders to capture the stories of ordinary people and reimagine the historical narrative. I fitted right in. I took one course a year. Once a week during the fall and winter terms, I locked myself in my office at University College, completed the readings for that evening’s seminar, and travelled up to York to argue about what we had read. The two degrees took me 14 years. Today, universities pressure students to complete the



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PhD in four years, but it was right for me. I feel very lucky to have studied on my own timetable, as a rich complement to the other activities in my life. It’s amazing how well I was able to keep it secret. Years later the School’s director, Roy Shephard, told me that I would be a strong candidate to succeed him if only I had a PhD. “But I do!” I was able to say, to his complete surprise. The environment at York encouraged me to delve into those neglected stories of Canadian and international sports history that highlight under-represented or marginalized groups and suggest an alternative narrative. I called them “recovery projects.” My first foray was into the attempt to hold a “counter” Olympic Games at the time of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. During the debates on Montreal, I had often wondered whether we had any alternative. Athletes didn’t need multi-million dollar facilities to host their counterparts from other countries. We could have held the Games without over-stressing Canada’s most populous city. Then I discovered, in a single sentence in Richard Mandell’s The Nazi Olympics (1971), that an earlier generation had pursued a different vision of international sport. After an international attempt to boycott Hitler’s games failed, Mandell wrote, “morally offended Americans and Europeans were arranging to hold some ‘People’s Olympics’ or ‘Workers’ Games’ in Barcelona.” That opened a rabbit hole of questions and I jumped right in, ploughing through archives and interviewing my elders. At first, it was a disappointing reminder of the deep conservatism of Canadian mainstream sport and the naïvety of Canadian athletes. The former athletes I interviewed told me that they knew very little about Nazi atrocities at the time. Jim Worrall, who carried the Canadian flag in the Opening Ceremony at Berlin and whom I knew well, told me that he was “vaguely aware there was some concern before the Games about going to Germany but we were Depression kids and accepted things pretty much as they were.” Another university-educated member of the 1936 team,

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Halifax sprinter Aileen Meagher, told me she “had no idea there was any controversy over Canadian participation in the Games, probably because I was too caught up in my running and my job.” Where had they been? There had been demonstrations and public meetings in the cities where they lived, well-publicized appeals by the Canadian Youth Council, major trade unions and prominent figures such as Toronto mayor James Simpson, Aileen’s university president Carleton Stanley at Dalhousie, and former Olympic champion Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld. The best-known sportswriters weighed in about the issues, condemning the protests and calling for participation in Germany. The (Toronto) Evening Telegram columnist Ted Reeve had written that racism, hostile crowds, and the unfair decisions of hometown referees were simply challenges that champions had to overcome. Canadian athletes should “give or take their bumps without crying too much,” he wrote on October 29, 1935. Only two prominent Canadian athletes refused to go – the feisty Eva Dawes, bronze medallist in the high jump at the 1932 Olympics, and champion race walker Henry Cieman, who was Jewish. The ­Canadian Olympic Committee voted to ignore the protests and send teams to Germany. Then I discovered an entirely different sector of Canadian sports much more in tune with my values. A loose coalition of left-wing immigrant sports clubs led the anti-Olympic protests. They were part of the Workers’ Sports Association of Canada, coordinated by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). The WSA inherited a long tradition of sport for all among working people and others excluded from mainstream sport. During the interwar years, they created their own organizations, sports, and events to ensure that everyone got a chance. In major cities, small prairie towns, and the resource hinterland, strong, vital WSA clubs conducted all manner of sports, including track and field, wrestling, basketball,



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baseball, and cross-country skiing, often in hand-built facilities. The strongest were Finnish Canadian. They had their own federation. There were also Ukrainian, Jewish, and Czech associations and multi-cultural urban clubs. Once a year, even in the Depression, every club in the country would practise an agreed-upon set of mass gymnastic routines and meet in one city to perform them together, even if they had to jump freight trains (“the slide door Pullman”) to do so. It was fascinating to read about their activities in the communist press, and track down participants and documents. I heard remarkable stories of achievement, pleasure, and pride. My favourites emanated from an annual cross-country ski trek from Beaver Lake (near Sudbury) to South Porcupine (near Timmins), a distance of 240 kilometres and return. Many of the skiers were unemployed miners who wore miners’ lamps to light their way in the short days of winter. It was telling confirmation that the lived landscape of Canadian sport is much broader than that presented by the capitalist sports media. My interest in Finnish Canadian workers’ sports led to one memorable trip. In 1982, I was invited to lead a runners’ tour to the Helsinki Marathon. I agreed to go to find out more about the workers’ sports federation in Finland (TUL), still thriving with 380,000 members. The condition was that I run the marathon myself. I had been running regularly but not for a marathon. With only three months to prepare, I steeply increased my mileage, relying heavily on interval workouts. It went so well that, every week, I felt I could run a little faster. By the time I reached Helsinki, I wanted to break my “personal worst” of 2:44, the dismal time I had clocked years previously when I “blew up” in a race in Toledo. The Helsinki race began alongside the statue of Paavo Nurmi featured on the Olympic poster that my father brought back in 1952 and that I still have. I felt completely at home, and happily dipped under my target time. It turned out to be my last marathon. After

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the race, I spent several extremely productive days with colleagues at TUL, including one entire day at the cottage of sociologist Paavo Seppänen, sipping vodka, exchanging stories in his sauna, and jumping into the nearby lake. At a time when mainstream sport eschewed politics, the WSAs used sports to illustrate the inequalities and unjustness of Canadian society. They decried the lack of safety in boxing, the “slave wages” of players in the National Hockey League, and the forced amateurism of the Olympic sports. They called for athletes’ rights, players’ control, and free and universal recreation. Following the lead of Lester Rodney, a sports writer at the New York Daily Worker, they were among the first non-Blacks to call for the integration of Major League Baseball. As I sat reading microfilm in darkened libraries, I cheered. It was such a revelation. When the Olympic boycott failed, the WSA put together a Canadian team for what was planned as the “People’s” or “Counter Olympics” in Barcelona. Five athletes, including Eva Dawes, two Jewish boxers, Sam Luftspring and Norman “Baby” Yack, who had been persuaded by their parents not to go to Berlin, and manager Harry Sniderman, set out for Barcelona. The Canadian Jewish Congress also provided financial support. But Franco began the military uprising that started the Spanish Civil War on the morning of the opening ceremonies. The “People’s Olympics” never took place. The Canadians were turned back at the Spanish border. I interviewed them all. The ill-fated Barcelona Games were organized by two rival European-based workers’ sports internationals, the Red Sport International (RSI) and the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI). Each had more than two million members, opening another rich vein for my historical research. For most of the interwar period, the internationals fought each other as much as they polemicized against the IOC. It was only with the Nazis’ brutal



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attacks upon their members that they cautiously joined to oppose the 1936 Olympics and compete together in the 1937 Workers’ Olympiad in Antwerp. The most militant of the internationals was the RSI, a creature of the Soviet Union. Most clubs in Canada identified with the RSI, and as often as possible sent competitors to their multi-sport Spartakiads. In 1935, the WSA sent a delegation of Canadian athletes and coaches to study sport in the Soviet Union. Their diaries and reminiscences provided an extraordinary window on the Soviets’ post-revolutionary experiments in sports. The RSI disbanded following the Second World War when the Soviet Union joined the IOC’s Olympics. I was much more attracted to the SWSI, whose politics were closer to my own. It held winter and summer Workers’ Olympics every six years. The 1931 Workers’ Olympics in Vienna was arguably the largest international sporting event ever held, with 80,000 participants, 25,000 of whom were women. The media, photo, and film coverage is just amazing. By comparison, only 1,408 competitors, including 107 women, took part in the IOC’s Olympics in Los Angeles the following year. I always cite the Workers’ Olympics whenever someone says that the IOC’s Olympics are getting too large and the number of athletes should be reduced. Instead of the overarching narratives of nation-state competition that characterized the IOC’s Games, the Workers’ Olympics focused on international solidarity among the working people of all countries, “no more war,” and sport for all. Though badly damaged by fascism, the Second World War, and the transformations of post-war Europe, the SWSI and Workers’ Olympics continue to this day as the International Workers and Amateurs in Sport Federation (CSIT) and the World Sport Games. Sadly, these activities are rarely covered in the mainstream media. Studying the CSIT has given me many years of fascinating research and rewarding exchanges. When it celebrated its

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centenary in Brussels in 2013, I was honoured to be one of the invited speakers. The politics of the interwar period also drew me to a feminist sports international, la Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI). Because the IOC excluded women, French feminist Alice Milliat organized Women’s Olympics in Paris in 1922 and Gothenburg in 1926, and Women’s World Games in Prague in 1930 and London in 1934. In 1928, she agreed to change the name to the Women’s World Games in exchange for ten athletics events on the IOC program. She kept her part of the bargain, but the IOC did not. In 1934, Milliat disbanded her games in the vain hope that the IOC would appoint an equal number of female members and create an equal number of women’s events. It was the FSFI that led me to the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada. WAAF, as it was widely known, was its Canadian affiliate. Despite continual ridicule from the malestream press, the patronizing indulgence of the AAU, and extremely scarce resources, WAAF provided inspired and determined leadership for women’s sport in Canada from the early 1920s until it was forced to disband in 1953, at the lowest ebb for women’s sport in the 20th century. I tracked down some of their records and interviewed many of the leaders before they died. One of them, Margaret Lord, whom I knew well as a young athlete, was very cross with me: “Why didn’t you ask me these questions years ago when I still had all my marbles?” she asked. I turned it back to her and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me and the other athletes you led about the tremendous accomplishments of interwar women’s sports?” It was a painful conversation. Margaret eventually admitted that after WAAF’s inglorious demise, she became convinced that its history was unimportant. Yet as a result, the lessons from WAAF’s experience were unavailable to the sport activists of the 1960s.



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The histories of the WSA, WAAF, RSI, CSIT, FSFI, and similar organizations demonstrate that it is possible to imagine alternatives to contemporary sport and that real people pursued them. Each of them produced remarkable athletes and leaders whose efforts should be remembered today. The Edmonton Grads (basketball) and the Preston Rivulettes (hockey) set attendance records wherever they played and achieved winning streaks that have never been duplicated. WAAF organizers and sportswriters Alexandrine Gibb and Myrtle Cook were astute, tireless, and tough. In Germany, the national wrestling champion Werner Seelenbinder, a communist, spent the 1936 Olympics in the Olympic Village warning the athletes of other delegations about the Nazis. He was subsequently arrested and executed, but during the German Democratic Republic, a trophy bearing his name was presented annually to the athlete of the year, keeping the memory of his activism alive. In France, the socialist Leo Lagrange, the world’s first minister of sport, transformed the lives of workers and their families by legislating paid holidays and subsidizing travel to and accommodation in holiday resorts. He was the father of the famous August shutdowns in France. When students despair about the possibilities of change, I always start with the historical precedent. Drawing crowds for women’s sports? I can show that during some of the interwar years, more Torontonians paid to watch women play softball at Sunnyside Stadium than paid to watch men play professional baseball down the road at Maple Leaf Stadium. Tax professional sports to support grassroots and Olympic sports? It happened in Ontario, with great benefit, for about 20 years. To be sure, most of these organizations, and the initiatives they made, were destroyed by world events, failed, or were overtaken by the forces of patriarchal sports capitalism. We cannot simply wish that away, or turn back

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the clock. But if we study their history in the context of the conditions we face, perhaps we can learn how to be more successful next time. Another foray was into the career of the Onondaga runner Tom Longboat. Longboat won the Boston Marathon in record time in 1907 and raced for Canada in the 1908 Olympics. I had been commissioned to write Longboat’s biography, but put it off for more than a year because the widely told story was utterly depressing, of a gifted runner who refused to train and squandered his remarkable talents through alcohol and partying. When I started digging into the sources, the oft-told story just didn’t make sense. I had run marathons myself, and could not accept that anyone could run the times Longboat did untrained and inebriated. When I visited his reserve at Six Nations, I heard that he was an exemplar of fitness who ran and walked long distances throughout his life, right up until his death in 1949. “Tom would never thank you for a ride, even in the depths of winter,” his friend Frank Montour told me, describing several occasions in his car when he overtook Longboat walking briskly down a snow-swept road, declining the offer of a lift. I also came across photos from the 1930s showing an elegant Longboat, confidently dressed in top coat, suit, silk tie, and fedora, as the guest of honour at Toronto meets, hardly the figure of despair portrayed in the media. It led me to read the complaints more carefully. When the AAU insisted that he have a Euro-Canadian coach and, later, when he ran professionally under a white manager, he did frequently “refuse to train.” But as I read between the lines, he “refused” because he knew his own body better than anyone and had little use for the sprint workouts imposed upon him. He much preferred the long runs and walks he learned from the Iroquois tradition that marathoners today would recognize as “long slow distance.” The penny dropped when a sportswriter in the Toronto Star approvingly



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quoted a coach’s complaint that Longboat was “not training, just walking 12 miles a day.”1 Have you ever “just” gone for a 12-mile walk? Longboat was an extraordinary athlete. He could win from the front and win from behind. He won the first World Professional Marathon Championship established after the 1908 Olympic Marathon, and headlined the professional running circuit that lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands flocked to his races. When he won, he was feted as a “proud Canadian,” but when he lost or complained about his coaches, he was slammed as a “wayward Indian.” At every stage of his life, he faced the racism that we are now struggling to address through “truth and reconciliation” and persevered. Longboat always held his head high. He was taken from his parents and placed in a residential school but ran away. He was arrested and called a drunk because, as a professional runner, he had to work the taverns to drum up interest in his races among the sporting crowd. Under the Indian Act, simply being in a bar was a criminal offence. He refused to push back against taunts and insults, preferring to let his running speak for his character. In an age when most professional athletes were ruthlessly controlled by their “owners,” Longboat bought out his contract from his white manager, took over his own training and race calendar, and ran faster than ever. No one ever gave him credit for that, even when other runners adopted his training methods. I discovered that the “rags to riches to rags” story came from one widely quoted source, written by someone who relied heavily upon those Longboat disdained, and repeated uncritically generation after generation. I’m proud to have contributed to the restoration of Longboat’s reputation within settler society. In the years since my book Tom Longboat was published, he has received renewed recognition in

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school, street, and day naming, a stamp, films, and other books. As I was conducting the research, I tried out my revisionist interpretations on my running pals Jack Friel, David Fujiwara, Roz Fulwell, and Corey Gibson. At the time, they were planning a new running club and thinking out loud about different names. One day Jack said, “Tom Longboat was exactly the runner we hope to be, so let’s call it after him.” After getting permission from the Longboat family, that’s exactly what they did. The Longboat Road Runners thrive to this day, and organize one of the best races of the Toronto calendar, the Toronto Island Run. On one of my visits to Six Nations, Tom Longboat Jr. told me that when his father won the Boston Marathon in 1907, the City of Toronto promised him $500 but never paid it. “Would you help us get the money?” he asked. When my own research confirmed the story, I went to my former track and field teammate John Sewell, then Toronto’s mayor. John commissioned an audit, which showed that the money was never paid. But when we proposed a scholarship in Longboat’s name, we were bombarded with protests, and claims that the money was paid long ago. Several people said that Longboat got the money under the table. Toronto Star sports columnist Milt Dunnell told me that “the City of Toronto simply gave him a house.” I researched every property Longboat occupied in Toronto, including one then owned by former U of T president Claude Bissell. We showed definitely that the City never gave Longboat a house. It took a special act of the Ontario legislature, but eventually his heirs received $10,000. Much more needs to be done to integrate the accomplishments of Indigenous athletes – and their sorry treatment – into the story of Canada and Canadian sport. My historical investigations reinforced the view of sports as a contested terrain that I had been developing in my activism. While I had grown up assuming that sports were natural, common



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to every society, and innocent of political power, it made much more sense to see them as a historically specific, upper-class masculinist project, spread around the world through imperialism, trade, and emulation, and embraced and challenged in a creative variety of ways by those excluded. Of all the narratives of modern sports – including the acceptance of uniform rules around the world, the dazzling application of technology, the continual improvement in performance, and the exponential growth in mass media coverage – the long struggle for meaning and inclusion is the most interesting and important. These ideas shaped my doctoral thesis. I examined four quite different ambitions to shape sports in the interests of nation building in the period between the First and Second World Wars – the Amateur Athletic Union, the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation, the Workers’ Sports Association, and the National Hockey League. At one point, I intended to complete a fifth case study, of l’Association Athlétique d’Amateurs de National, the Catholic “national” sports association that organized a vast network of youth programs in Quebec. I already had too much material, so I stopped at four. I’ve always regretted that. I have since learned from Indigenous historian Allan Downey’s book The Creator’s Game that there was an attempt to link Indigenous sports organizations across Canada at the very same time. It, too, should be included in a full history of the period. Chris Armstrong, the erudite and irreverent business and environmental historian, was my very helpful supervisor and “coach.” He was a master of archival sources and a writer’s writer. Chris treated me as a friend and colleague, but never shied away from reading me the riot act whenever I disappeared into one of my other projects. I have always been grateful for his support. As everyone knows, the NHL won out. But the outcome was uncertain for much of that period. If it had not been for the

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Depression, the decision by the fledgling CBC to give legitimacy to the NHL through “Hockey Night in Canada,” and the discovery by corporations that broadcasting men’s hockey was the best way to deliver male listeners to their advertisements, a relationship that became the major source of media revenue and reinforced the neglect of women’s sports, the result might have been different. It’s a legacy that shapes us to this day. The lesson for me is that we must continually deepen our historical understanding so we can better understand the forces and decisions that have shaped us, and the possibilities for change.

20 STRUGGLING FOR THE OLYMPIC IDEALS

Two protests led me back to Olympic activism. In 1978, I joined a coalition of religious and civil rights groups campaigning against the construction of a prison in Lake Placid, New York, to serve as the athletes’ village during the 1980 Winter Olympics. Stop the Olympic Prison, as the campaign was called, sought to end the frighteningly high imprisonment rates of young Black males through a moratorium on prison construction. The prison had been approved as an Olympic facility. It was deeply upsetting to see the Olympic ideals perverted to further racial incarceration. Then came the US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. I threw myself into the fight-back campaign, convinced that President Carter’s concerns about Soviet imperialism were hypocritical, and that the people-to-people intercultural communication fostered by the Olympics could slow down the resumption of Cold War tensions. During the height of the debate, I participated in a “fact-finding” tour of the Soviet Union initiated by Sid Effros, the New York-based organizer of Olympic tour packages who stood to lose in the event the US and Canada pulled out. I was one of three Canadians, along with Hart Cantelon of Queen’s University and the CBC’s Maxine Crook. There were 16 Americans and one Puerto Rican. Our only obligation was to participate in the drafting of a group statement.

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We spent our time in Moscow and Leningrad amid a whirlwind of publicity and rumours about Soviet dirty tricks and American retaliation. Terry Devlin, the Canadian embassy official we interviewed, angrily pressed us to support the boycott. When I spoke about the Olympics as a peace movement that brought the world together, he told me, “You sound like Pravda.” On our final evening, just as we were beginning to draft the statement, former sprinter Linda Huey dramatically outed former Olympic swimmer Andrew Strenk as a US Central Intelligence Agency informant. The room exploded and Effros chased Strenk out of the room. It took all my skills as chair to get everyone to return to what we wanted to say. It was clear that the Moscow organizers were prepared to stage fine Olympics. People told us that an Olympic boycott would not alter Soviet foreign policy but that they felt safer with international sports. Soviet sports fans seemed to know more about Canadian Olympic athletes than most Canadians and were looking forward to seeing them compete that summer. Hart and I urged Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to honour his 1980 election promise to oppose the boycott and increase the resources for Canadian sport, with a new emphasis upon “fundamental opportunities for all.” Instead, Trudeau bowed to US pressure and directed the Canadian Olympic Association to stay home. Despite the overwhelming desire of Canadian athletes to compete, the COA complied. It was a huge betrayal. The United States Olympic Committee stayed home as well, despite the concerted effort of American athletes to go. Athletes from 80 countries participated in Moscow, some under the Olympic Flag to show their independence from government, while 66 nations stayed away. It was the lowest participation in the Games since 1956, and triggered the tit-for-tat Soviet-led boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later.



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CALGARY 1988 After three unsuccessful tries, Calgary was awarded the 1988 Olympic Winter Games, with full federal support. I was excited. The scale and costs were manageable. Winter Olympics would give us a chance to promote the Olympic spirit, foster intercultural exchange, and create “sport for all” in the ice and snow sports. I had always shared Gilles Vigneault’s belief that “mon pays c’est l’hiver.” The winter sports were integral to that view. The 1980s were a period of abundant snow and consistently low temperatures, even in southern Ontario. I thought we could give every Canadian the opportunity to learn and enjoy the winter sports. In a report I wrote for Abby at Sport Canada, I urged the federal government to help every large municipality construct an artificial speed-skating oval, ski jump, and sliding track. I felt the Games could give us the opportunity to strengthen curling, figure skating, and hockey, sports in which we were already well organized and accomplished. We could reinvigorate the manufacture and export of the required equipment to contribute to a strengthened industrial strategy. I also advised it to create a new national winter “ice and snow” holiday to commemorate the Games and to encourage Canadians to be active in the outdoors. Disappointingly, few of these ideas were taken up. The federal government had its hands full with the politics of the National Energy Policy and the Constitution. Soon after Calgary got the Games, the price of oil dropped precipitously in response to an oil glut, energy conservation, and a worldwide economic downturn. The Alberta economy went into shock. While there was no inflation and Dick Pound negotiated a whopping $309-million US television contract, three times that of 1984, uncertainty in the Alberta economy and the spectre of the Montreal deficits put decision makers on edge. The organizing committee and all three levels of government limited their efforts to completing the

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facilities and conducting good Games. It was a telling lesson that unless progressive plans are incorporated right from the very beginning, the adrenalin of staging the games will push everything else to the margins. Nor was there support for winter “sport for all” at Sport Canada. Abby felt that the priority was restoring high-performance funding and building capacity among the winter sports bodies so that Canadian athletes could compete with success in Calgary. Despite the breakthroughs enabled by the new programs put in place for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, the federal government drastically cut funding during the 1980 boycott, scattering the expertise and eliminating the special assistance that had helped so many athletes perform well on the world stage. It took Abby several years to reconstruct something similar, called “Best Ever,” first for the winter sports and eventually for the summer sports. Even then it was not base (i.e., permanent) funding. Sports minister Otto Jelinek, who made it to the Olympics in figure skating aided by his family’s wealth, was opposed to state support for athletes and was always pushing for cuts and privatization. After one debate, we almost traded punches. Calgary staged justly named “Best Ever” games. It built important new facilities, created a legacy fund to sustain programming and maintenance in those facilities, and engaged the community and international teams in imaginative, heartfelt ways. It created an innovative education program about the Olympic values that was eventually taught across Canada. I just wish it had had more impact upon grassroots sports development outside Alberta.

THE OLYMPIC ACADEMY OF CANADA The International Olympic Committee has long called itself the head of a social movement dedicated to “building a peaceful and



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better world by educating youth through sport practised in accordance with the Olympic values.”1 Despite the obvious tensions between the ideals and the day-to-day of sports, the IOC and many National Olympic Committees have created an institution – the Olympic Academy – to educate its members in the ideals and provide a forum for addressing the contradictions. In 1983, COA president Roger Jackson asked me and Jean Leiper of the University of Calgary to help create such an academy in Canada. I jumped at the opportunity. It brought back all the hopes for the Olympics that I had learned from my father and my experiences in Tokyo. We fashioned the Olympic Academy of Canada as a week-long residential workshop, held in a different part of Canada every year. The starting point for every academy was “the aspirations of Olympism,” our interpretation of the ideals set out by founder Pierre de Coubertin – sport as education, sport for all, fair competition, international understanding, the integration of sport with the arts, independent decision making, and, of course, excellence. In our view, Coubertin designed the Olympics as the focal point for a strategy of education and social change through sports, not “sport for sport’s sake.” At a time when the European countries were competing for colonies and arming for war, he promoted Olympic sport as a strategy of international, intercultural communication and exchange. Implicit in its ambition was the belief in a common, universal humanity. Coubertin’s vision was complicated by his aristocratic, patriarchal, and Eurocentric biases, so we interpreted him through a contemporary lens. He called for sport for all but opposed female participation, so we said that the Olympics must promote gender equity. What was exciting was challenging participants, most of whom were athletes, coaches, and teachers, to use the aspirations to work on current problems of Canadian and international sports,

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i.e., realize the rhetoric in practice. Many others contributed, including Sue Boreskie of the University of Manitoba, Lyle Makosky of the Niagara Institute and soon-to-be deputy minister of fitness and amateur sport, Ottawa management consultant Dorothy Strachan, Rob Beamish of Queen’s, and Geneviève Rail of the Université d’Ottawa. They were all exemplary educators with extensive sports experience. COA leaders and staff contributed, notably Maurice Allan, Diana Duerkop, Kathleen Giguere, Pierre Labelle, and Irene Schachtler. Leading the Academy became a major focus of my volunteer activities for the next ten years. It often felt that we were swimming against the current. The culture of Olympic sport increasingly focused on winning to the exclusion of everything else. The enormous capitalist commodification of the Olympics that has taken place over the last 40 years was well underway. Yet there was a strong appetite among participants, especially athletes, for the full, humanist agenda. In fact, it was haunting to experience the hunger among athletes for something more meaningful than results. At the first Academy, Chris Critelli, a two-time basketball Olympian from St. Catharines, said that it was the very first time anyone had ever told her what the Olympic Movement was really about. We heard that over and over again. It prefigured the athlete leadership in sport for development and other philanthropic causes that has characterized recent decades. We also heard former Olympians report abysmal conditions, industrial regimentation, and damaging abuse by coaches and administrators. There had always been bad coaches. But as amateur participation gave way to full-time training and competition, it seemed as if the maltreatment intensified, justified by the conviction that medals, rankings, and records in international competition were the sole purpose of the Olympic sports. Sport Canada policies and corporate sponsorship that tied funding to world rankings reinforced this approach, what I came to call “the



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ideology of excellence.” The Academy provided a form of assurance and support for participants who had been hurt by the system and an avenue to discuss redress. We had sessions on funding, doping, gender equality, the anti-apartheid campaign, homophobia, the Calgary and Montreal Olympics, and much else. Many subsequent initiatives, such as Canadian opposition to the Olympic sex test, the creation of an association of national team athletes, now AthletesCAN, and the COA’s program to help athletes through retirement, had their origins at the Academy. There were always tensions with the COA leadership. At the very first Canadian academy, at a time when the COA’s selection standards were more stringent than the IOC’s, a group of former Olympic athletes staged a mock trial, putting the COA in the dock for “violating the Olympic spirit” by denying many deserving athletes the chance to compete. COA president Jackson and IOC members Dick Pound and Jim Worrall were called upon to testify in the policy’s defence. In a vote among participants, the COA was only “acquitted” by a narrow vote. But even when they disagreed with particular topics or points of view, Roger, Dick, and Jim provided steady support. In fact, their regular participation gave us tremendous immediacy. One highlight became an annual “IOC press conference,” in which Dick answered participants’ questions from his perspective as an IOC vice president, first as if he were in Lausanne, with bland, obfuscating answers, and then with real answers and tips on ferreting out information from his closed-mouthed colleagues. Dick Pound is a complicated ally. He is brilliant in a crisis, and over and over again has led the Olympic Movement through difficult challenges. He understands the humanitarian aspirations of the Olympics as well as anyone. He is a respected historian in his spare time and generous with researchers, reporters, and students. But his forthrightness, acerbic tongue, and sometimes flippant,

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insensitive public comments have cost him friends, and ultimately influence. When he ran for the IOC presidency in 2001 on a reform platform, I canvassed for him. Members told me that he was by far and away the most intelligent and able member of the organization, that the IOC owed much of its tremendous growth and legitimacy during the Samaranch years to his work, but that they would never vote for him. Then they recounted some cutting quip or broadside that turned them against him. It was quite disconcerting. After Jacques Rogge won that election, he asked Dick to head up the newly created World Anti-Doping Agency. The assignment was widely regarded as a “poisoned chalice” because of the many sports bodies that tried to torpedo it. Dick made WADA an essential pillar of world sport, an extraordinary accomplishment. While scorned by the IOC leadership, he still intervenes on the big issues with sage advice and remains one of world’s most uncompromising opponents of doping in sport. I consider him a friend. In the late 1980s, we began inviting representatives of other National Olympic Academies to provide an international perspective. We structured Canadian participation in the IOA to advance progressive positions. But the COA never let us organize the alumni lest it become a powerful, alternative voice. I now regret that we did not try harder to do so. It was during the 1984 Academy in Val Morin, Quebec, that I met Phyllis. She was there representing the Calgary Olympic Organizing Committee, where she was manager of community outreach and pageantry. We hit it off immediately. After the Academy, when she travelled to Toronto to visit her sister, I took her cycling to the Leslie Street Spit, a landfill jutting out from the eastern waterfront created by decades of excavations. I was part of the group that argued for the Spit’s “natural self-development” as a wilderness area – allowing wind, water, birds, and animals to seed and populate it, with cars and construction prohibited. I was very proud of it, a gleaming, green preserve at the foot of a major city. But



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when she saw the concrete and rebar in the clay, she just laughed. “You call this wilderness? When you next come to Calgary, I will show you wilderness.” When I got off the plane on that next trip, she took me straight to the Rockies. So began a transcontinental affair, a year together in Calgary during 1988, marriage at Lake Louise, and her move to Toronto. She’s another reason why my heart is so strongly attached to the Olympics. I have always sought to expand the experiences of athletes and coaches travelling for competition, so that they return with a sense of the people and culture of the places they visit. It was Coubertin’s overarching aspiration and it was how I had lived international sports myself. With the “ideology of excellence,” many coaches discourage athletes from meeting others or seeing the sights. Athletes at the Academy told me that they spent most of their time lying on their beds visualizing their races, rarely leaving their hotels except for training and competition. In 1988, I was part of an international team of social scientists, led by cultural anthropologists Kang Shin Pyo of Inje University in Korea and John MacAloon of the University of Chicago. The Seoul Organizing Committee had commissioned us to study the extent of intercultural exchange at those Games. Their slogan was “Seoul to the world, the world to Seoul.” The organizing committee, supported by groups such as the Korean Canadian Council, enabled participants, families, the media, and other visitors to learn about Korea through house visits, artistic events, and tours. When I interviewed Canadians, I found that participants in the Olympic Youth Camp, families and friends, and members of the media immersed themselves in Korean culture, but not athletes and coaches. Most only arrived in Seoul for their events, tried to reproduce the conditions back home, and left as soon as their competitions were over. The chef de mission, Carol Anne Letheren, threw the invitations in the garbage, telling me that it would undermine their performances. As one athlete told me, “I could

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have been in Don Mills for all I learned about Korea.” My colleagues found much the same for the other First World delegations. On the other hand, the dance floor in the Olympic Village every night was a sea of Black and Brown bodies: the Olympic spirit of intercultural exchange was alive and well among athletes from the Global South. When I broached the contradictions with Olympic leaders, many – but not all – regretted the intensification of training and specialization that had rendered this aspiration unrealizable but felt that it could never be reversed. Roger told me, “That sort of thing is very important, but it can only happen after the Games or even after an athlete’s active career.” Abby told me that “it is simply not part of the Sport Canada mandate.” Jacques Rogge was sympathetic, but told me that it would have to be achieved another way. In 2007, he initiated the Youth Olympic Games with a strong focus on intercultural exchange. I took that as both a formal admission that Coubertin’s most cherished goal was no longer viable in the adult Games and a creative attempt to pursue it in another way. My involvement with the Olympic Academy ended in 1993, when Carol Anne succeeded Roger as COA president and decided to turn the Academy into a “celebration of excellence.” I have always felt that she threw away a tremendous opportunity to provide a more rewarding experience for Canadian athletes and coaches and nurture a more progressive approach to Canadian sport.

FORGING A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC OLYMPICS I have always wanted to host a major games in Toronto, to give Canadian athletes the chance to compete at home and enable Canadians to enjoy the festive buzz of multi-sport international competitions. But I have never been in favour of Olympics under any circumstances, and certainly not against the wishes of the



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population or at the expense of other socially important projects. Yet that was the risk in the late 1980s when a small group of Torontonians launched a bid for the 1996 Olympics. Led by Paul Henderson, an accomplished Olympic sailor and sports leader with (by his own proud admission) a fierce distaste for the democratic process, the group wanted a tightly controlled corporate bid on the 1984 Los Angeles model, with modest Games, private funding, and a minimum of accountability and consultation. Focusing its early energies on lobbying the IOC, it simply assumed that citizens would support the bid. That was a monster mistake in a city with a tradition of open consultation and democratic decision making. Very soon, a broad coalition of urban reformers, anti-poverty activists, labour unions, and church and environmental groups calling itself “Bread Not Circuses” mounted a concerted opposition. Whereas Henderson proclaimed Toronto a “world class city,” BNC stressed the underside of the 1980s growth, the 15,000 homeless, the 200,000 who lived in sub-standard housing, and the 80,000 estimated to depend upon food banks, an institution that barely existed at the beginning of the decade. Many of my political friends were opposed to the bid. My brother David, a shop steward for the Canadian Union of Public Employees at the City of Toronto, was one of the BNC leaders. The media loved the idea of two brothers taking opposite sides, so we were frequently invited to debate. Whenever we did so, we had breakfast earlier that day to keep the relationship intact. Both of us would start our presentations with “He’s my brother and I love him.” It was very difficult all the same. How to make Toronto games worthwhile? Working closely with parks commissioner Herb Pirk and the six-person NDP caucus at City Hall, I set out to incorporate an equity-focused social contract into the bid and then initiate public consultation on that contract. The “Toronto Olympic Commitment” identified social targets that Toronto Olympics would be expected to achieve. Heading that

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list was the requirement that all 9,000 proposed Olympic housing units be “affordable” by provincial standards and 60 per cent of them “social housing” for persons with low incomes. It stipulated that no resident would be displaced by visitors to the Games, the facilities would be designed for sport for all, and Olympic tickets would be subsidized for low-income Torontonians. The Commitment pledged to ensure gender parity in employment and volunteering for the organizing committee, to provide day care in all Olympic facilities, and to “use the City’s influence to improve the imbalance of sexes in the events of the Games.” It promised to maximize the number of union jobs, involve the corporate sponsors in the financial risks, and conduct environmental assessments for all projects. NDP councillors Jack Layton, who had grown up swimming in Dick Pound’s wake at the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, loved sports, and later became federal NDP leader, and Barbara Hall, who later became mayor, helped draft the targets. To contrast the Commitment with “Bread Not Circuses,” Barbara called it “Bread and Roses” after the International Women’s Day anthem. The City held two city-wide and 15 neighbourhood consultations, granting not-for-profit groups “intervener funding” to prepare their presentations. It hired Phyllis to plan and manage the consultations. In the end, after a day-long debate with every councillor speaking, City Council approved the revised bid 12–5, with the NDP caucus splitting down the middle and Jack voting against it. Despite the significant improvements added by the Toronto Olympic Commitment, we lost to Atlanta. To this day, Paul says that Jack, Phyllis, and I cost Toronto the bid. In the late 1990s, Toronto bid for the 2008 Olympics with very different leadership and style. David Crombie, affectionately known as “the tiny perfect mayor” since the time he held that office in the 1970s, led the bid. He recruited a broad, diverse spectrum of community leaders and a highly professional, politically astute staff to



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prepare it. While the bid was focused on improving the waterfront, Crombie insisted that every aspect be subject to socially-, environmentally-, and accessibility-sensitive planning and public consultations. David appointed me chair of the Legacy and Community Enhancement Committee. In 28 public forums, 24 special-purpose focus groups (from tenants and homeless people to businesses), and mail and telephone surveys, we asked citizens to identify their biggest hopes and fears from Toronto Olympics and what they would most like to see happen. That exercise produced seven major concerns – housing, employment, training and volunteering, security and civil rights, social services, community sport, and community spirit. The next phase was the development of a plan to realize the hopes and prevent the fears with implementation and monitoring strategies. We were well along in that work, in discussion with governments and social agencies, when the IOC awarded the Games to Beijing.

TORONTO 2015 Toronto did win an international games in 2009, when we were awarded the 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games. Ontario sports minister Jim Watson (now the mayor of Ottawa) initiated the bid as a strategy to address the sorry inadequacy of sports facilities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Apart from the comprehensive facility plan, it had none of the social, economic, or environmental planning and consultation that characterized the Olympic bids. Nor was much thought given to how Toronto Games would engage the Americas. It was “all about us” and what we could leverage from major games. But they were very successful games. Former Ontario premier David Peterson got the votes, and Toronto got the Games. New and renovated facilities were spread across the entire arc of the GTA, from Oshawa to Minden to Welland. New housing was built

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on a reclaimed site near the Toronto waterfront. A high-speed train connected downtown Toronto to the airport. By requiring local institutions to assume 44 per cent of the capital costs and most of the ongoing operating costs – i.e., to really want those facilities – the province ensured that there would be few “white elephants.” The region has benefited from brilliant new and renovated aquatic facilities, a velodrome, two new stadiums, and other significant upgrades. The University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, where I subsequently became principal, became the site of a marvellous aquatics complex, the Toronto Pan American Sports Centre. It houses the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario in an innovative partnership between the university, the City of Toronto, and the high-performance community. These experiences have forced the world to rethink the idea of major games. Since 2001, a growing list of cities in liberal-democratic countries have withdrawn from Olympic bidding, because citizens felt that the proposed Games offered more problems than benefits. In response, the IOC and international federations like FIFA now insist that cities incorporate socio-economic and environmental planning, respect for human rights, and community consultation in their Olympic and World Cup bids, very much what Toronto sought to do in 1996 and 2008. The successful Canada-Mexico-United States bid for the 2026 men’s World Cup in football and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic bid provided such plans. The IOC has opened the door to decentralized facilities games on the model of Toronto 2015. The ultimate test, of course, will be in the doing.

THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS The Olympics are predicated on a common, universal humanity. The IOC promises “the practice of sport as a human right.” Yet it has no effective mechanism to ensure the protection of human



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rights. This shortcoming has become even more glaring in recent years in the face of abuses in the staging of games, the ongoing sex test, and the prohibitions against athletes’ free speech. In 2020, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights concluded that the IOC and the international sports bodies have neither the appetite nor the capacity to protect their members’ human rights. She recommended that they urgently do so. For the longest time, the Olympic leadership argued that to engage such a diverse world, they must turn a blind eye to the laws and practices of host countries, National Olympic Committees, and the international federations, on the grounds that a “low threshold” was necessary to enable a “big tent.” It was the Olympic version of the principle of “non-intervention” in the affairs of sovereign states that held in international affairs. I defended this position myself for many years. Today it’s a different world. The tent is now full, with 206 national communities and all genders, classes, religions, and persons with disabilities actively involved. The United Nations has begun to move from “non-intervention” towards “the responsibility to protect,” the idea that when a state openly violates its citizens’ rights, the UN should intervene. It’s time to extend the “responsibility to protect” to the Olympics. There has been some movement in recent years. In 2015, the IOC added “sexual orientation” to the anti-discrimination clause in the Olympic Charter. At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, the IOC created the Refugee Olympic Team to give visibility to the plight of the world’s 80 million refugees and dramatize their rights to dignity and opportunities. In 2017, it included reference to human rights with respect to the host city contract for the very first time. It remains to be seen how these provisions will be enforced. Despite its close relationship with the United Nations, the IOC only acknowledges a few of the internationally recognized human

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rights, and there is no mechanism for ensuring compliance. The IOC promotes the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing at the very time that the Chinese government systematically persecutes the Uighurs and other Turkish-speaking peoples in Xinjiang, a flagrant violation of everything the Olympics stand for. With escalating costs, human rights violations, the maltreatment of athletes, and the fact that fewer and fewer people in the world have the opportunity to participate in sports, I worry that the Olympic spirit is missing in action. Unless we can demonstrate that the Olympics actually contribute in measurable ways to a better world, they will increasingly lose support. People ask me why I still try to reform the Olympics. Some of my closest friends think I’ve parked my brains. But I persist. In part it’s personal, rooted in a lifetime of meaningful experiences. For the most part, it’s because I believe the world needs international sport as a medium of people-to-people intercultural respect and understanding. That ideal is bigger than particular sports, athletes, teams, or nation states. Today, when there is so much xenophobia and hatred in the world, the Olympic spirit is more urgently needed than ever before. But it cannot heal without human rights.

21 A SPORTS SYSTEM WE CAN BE PROUD OF

Once the envy of other western countries, the “Canadian sports system” has rarely lived up to its promise. Sport Canada has never kept pace with the best government-led systems of the Commonwealth, Europe, and Cuba, nor systematically pursued the promises of the various international charters on sports as a right that Canada has signed. Politicians salute Olympic athletes on Parliament Hill but perpetuate underfunding and a reward system that exacerbates exploitative conditions. The story in mass sports is especially disappointing. Participation rates as measured by national surveys continue to fall, in step with increasing income, gender, and racial inequality and at significant cost to population health. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the decline in participation, especially among the most disadvantaged groups. It’s not that Canada does not have the policies. The federal Physical Activity and Sport Act and the federal-provincial-territorial agreement known as the Canadian Sport Policy commit to everything that we would need. Internationally, Canada has signed on to eloquent legal conventions that proclaim that “every human being has a fundamental right to physical education, physical activity and sport without discrimination.”1 Yet no Canadian government has ever made the effort to provide opportunities for every person who lives here.

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It’s a “say-do” gap. It’s drawn me into a lifetime of advocacy and the long, complicated process of policy making and oversight. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t involved in a campaign or a task force to change or strengthen some policy or other, writing, speaking, and engaging public officials. I once encountered external affairs minister Joe Clark in the Calgary airport, introduced myself, and began arguing for stronger Canadian international presence in sports. He put up his hand to stop me and smiled. “I know what you are going to say,” he said. “I’m still trying to catch up to all your correspondence.” In Ottawa, I’ve sought to move the metrics for “excellence” (which drive Sport Canada funding) from athletes’ placings on the world list to the quality and accessibility of opportunities Canadians have in each sport, with a focus on the material and social conditions. It makes little sense to give our best athletes heroic targets without addressing the conditions they enjoy compared to our competitors in other countries, or thinking about which Canadians have access to those opportunities. I’ve worked with athletes and others to establish athletes’ rights, including athlete voice and vote in decisions and explicit equity policies to fill the gaps. In Ontario, I pushed the provincial government to conduct an investigation of violence in hockey and apply the human rights code to sport. I chaired an investigation of amateur boxing that improved athlete safety and opened up the sport to women. When Bob Rae’s NDP government had to deal with the escalating debt created by the cost overruns of the publicly built SkyDome, I worked with finance minister Floyd Laughren and union leader Bob White to sell it back to the corporations that benefited from it, stopping the haemorrhaging of public funds. It is outrageous that rich corporations blackmail governments to support men’s professional sport with purpose-built facilities, tax write-offs, and



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other subsidies, when public recreation, women’s shelters, child care, and other urgent public needs go unfunded. In Toronto, I’ve joined efforts to make swimming and skating a basic part of the curriculum, schools and community centres more accessible, and bike paths safer and more effectively connected. I’ve even tried to abolish the bylaw prohibiting ball hockey on residential streets. I’ve tried to change the media, too. I’ve appealed to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which licenses radio and television stations, to pressure the CBC to provide more, and less sexist, coverage of Canadian sportswomen at times other than the Olympic Games and more coverage of Canadian events in Canada. In the 1980s, when the Toronto Star did a feature on “the best 10 fighters in the NHL,” Rob Beamish of Queen’s, Michael Smith of York, and I took it to the Ontario Press Council, indicting it for glorifying rule breaking and injury, a clear violation of media ethics. The Council ruled in our favour, yet within months, the Star’s cheerleading for fighting in hockey resumed. Looking back, there have been victories, but they’ve been frustratingly slow, often two steps forward and one step back. Even if you change a policy, there’s no guarantee that it will be implemented effectively. I still believe a state-led Canadian sports system is the right approach, and I’m still hopeful that we can convince elected governments to do better. Whenever I see the joy that sport and physical activity provide to those who have opportunity, I know it’s worth the effort. Whenever I got overly depressed during the long, often conflict-filled days I spent as dean of kinesiology at U of T, I would quietly step into the pool gallery to watch the swimmers, divers, and their coaches. The energy and camaraderie they radiated always lifted my spirits. But why shouldn’t everyone have access to similar opportunities? For me, a well-funded, pan-Canadian sports system, with a commitment to high performance and sport for all, is essential to an

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equitable and vibrant Canada. It would contribute significantly to comprehensive population health. One of the challenges is that the landscape for all government programs has radically changed. Sport Canada was a creation of the welfare state. Yet during the last 40 years, neo-liberal assaults on the ideals and programs of the welfare state and the abdication of sovereignty in trade agreements like NAFTA have made it very difficult for governments to mount ambitious social programs, especially high-quality sport. The well-to-do join luxurious private fitness clubs and send their kids to schools with strong sports programs, but refuse to endorse the policies and levels of taxation that would provide similar opportunities for every youth and adult. Whether at the Olympics or in the NHL, our best athletes come from an ever-narrowing segment of the urban middle class. As Rick Gruneau has documented in his recent paper, “Goodbye Gordie Howe,” the best player of a generation ago would never make the NHL today. His parents could not have afforded the fees.2 Sadly, sport policy is rarely discussed in legislatures or during election campaigns. When governments conduct “public consultation,” they only engage the established sports organizations, not the broader public. It doesn’t help that the media, which exhaustively cover the minutiae of the major corporate leagues, including the wholly US-based National Football League and their feeder teams in the US colleges, are completely uninterested in the policies and programs that structure opportunity in Canadian sport. It has only been with the crises that have caught the headlines that we’ve had genuine public debate about sport and the chance to make lasting change. One such moment followed Ben Johnson’s disqualification for steroids at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. When Johnson burst away from Carl Lewis to win the 100-metre final, people all across



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Canada jumped for joy. It was such an affirming story. A shy immigrant of colour, taking advantage of public opportunities, won the world’s premier competition in world record time, upsetting an American braggart in the process. At a reception that evening in Seoul, Lyle Makosky, the senior civil servant for sport, told me that “now the prime minister can call the [free trade] election! Canadians have nothing to fear from open competition.” Yet with Johnson’s disqualification 36 hours later, the country crashed to the ground, touching off a bitter debate about the values of sports. Sports minister Jean Charest appointed Ontario appeal court judge Charles Dubin to conduct a commission of inquiry. Mr. Dubin held televised hearings in Toronto and Montreal, with front-page coverage and a national audience. Athletes and coaches gave emotional accounts of the economic difficulties they experienced and pressures they faced to win. While some asked for sympathy, confessing to embarrassing intimacies of obtaining, injecting, and masking steroids, others called for harsh penalties for users. I empathized with the athletes and coaches who opposed the use of doping. They felt at a significant disadvantage when they competed against users or were compared for funding purposes to athletes from other countries whose best performances came in test-free meets. If one of the greatest contributions of sport is the self-education it encourages, it made no sense to abdicate that quest to the syringe or the pharmacist. Even before Johnson’s disqualification, Canadians familiar with his training methods disassociated themselves from his victory. Distance runner Paul Williams “refused to stand for a cheater” when “O Canada” was played during the victory ceremony in Seoul, and two respected coaches, Andy Higgins and Doug Clement, vowed that they would leave the sport if nothing was done to confront the scourge of doping. I also felt that the issue was more complicated. While Johnson and his coach Charlie Francis clearly broke the rules, the logic,

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pressures, and incentives of the system pushed them relentlessly towards “win at all costs.” Many athletes depended for their livelihood upon the medals they won and their world rankings. Francis said repeatedly that they had no choice but to use steroids to keep up with all the others who were doping. The lax enforcement of the rules allowed them to believe they enjoyed tacit support from sport officials. During Johnson’s remarkable build-up to Seoul, including his record-breaking world championship in Rome the previous year, it was widely believed that Sport Canada, Athletics Canada, and the international athletics federation turned a blind eye to the use of steroids. There was little logic to the banned list, no demonstrable relationship between the use of steroids and heightened performance, and sometimes little difference between prohibited drugs and those used for therapy. Some sports physicians argued that it was safer to administer steroids under medical supervision than to leave athletes to fend for themselves on the black market. Other critics argued that anti-doping was simply a replacement for amateurism as a strategy of control, and that in a liberal society it was absurd to enforce standards in sports that did not apply anywhere else. We all knew respected people in business, the academy, and the arts who used prescription drugs to perform under stress. Some even called for “normalization,” arguing that it would be safer, cheaper, and more ethical to dispense with anti-doping altogether. While I didn’t share these views, I felt that they needed to be heard. I was also concerned about the rights of athletes in testing and sentencing. Too many people were prepared to condemn the steroid users, while the officials who created the pressure got off scot-free. In preparing our submission to the Dubin Commission, Rob Beamish and I agonized over these issues. On the one hand, we agreed that it was imperative to investigate the growing use of performance-enhancing drugs. But we also felt that it was essential



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to address the “moral crisis” in the Olympic sports that provided the context for doping – the heightened pressure to win, the increasing requirement that athletes devote themselves entirely to training and competition, and the frenetic application of sport science. We called upon Canada to take the lead in restoring Pierre de Coubertin’s original educational, intercultural purpose to the Olympic Movement and international sports, and restructure the Canadian sports system with these goals in mind. We also questioned the secretive, arbitrary way that the list of prohibited substances and practices was developed, and called for an open, international discussion about the need and nature of such a list. If the international consensus for anti-doping was confirmed, we argued, the protocols and testing should be implemented in a much more transparent and procedurally fair manner. Finally, we pointed out that the use of performance-enhancing drugs was just one challenge to the “fairness” of Canadian and international sports. We urged Mr. Dubin to address other forms of inequality that affected competitive chances, especially widening income disparity, and differential access to facilities, top coaching, and medical support. In his report, Justice Dubin came down hard on doping and condemned the “failure of many sport-governing bodies (including the IOC and Sport Canada) to treat the drug problem more seriously and to take more effective means to detect and deter the use of drugs by athletes.”3 He called for an end to the system of self-regulation by which sports bodies were expected to police themselves, and recommended the creation of an agency completely independent of the sport governing bodies and government to implement doping control. He argued for a strong values-based approach to the development and administration of Canadian sport. I fully endorsed these recommendations. It was clear that the idea of a strong, uniformly and fairly administered anti-doping

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code had the overwhelming support of Canadian athletes and the Canadian public. I saw it as the best way of restoring the Olympic ideals of sport as self-development and respect for rules. At the same time, I continued to question the sole focus on the presence of prohibited drugs in an athlete’s system as the measure of unfairness and pushed for athletes’ rights in testing and sentencing. The Dubin report was a watershed in Canadian sport. It put closure to the debate about the role of drugs. Through the creation of what became the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports (CCES), it established the precedent that when the sports community lacked the willingness or capacity to police itself in a fundamental issue of public policy, it was better to create an independent regulatory body. Dubin’s call for “value-based sport” spurred new equity policies in many organizations; the encouragement of “athlete-centred” training, competition, and decision making; the creation of a new association to represent national team athletes, now AthletesCAN; and a new pan-Canadian organization, the Canadian Sport Council. The CSC was established on the basis of gender equity and the inclusion of athletes, coaches, and the full spectrum of agencies that provide or shape opportunities, including universities, colleges, and municipalities. Yet apart from the CCES, which operates to this day, the changes set in place by Dubin were quickly reversed or forgotten. The CSC was soon killed off, a victim of the savage cuts the federal government administered to sport and the greater public sector in 1994. With its demise went a much more representative voice for sport in Canada. Sport Canada quickly restored the international list as the basis for funding while neglecting to enforce its new policies on gender equity, the prevention of gender-based violence, and “athlete-centredness.” Other headlines provided opportunity to advance policy a few years later. Canadians won eight fewer medals at the 2000



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Olympics in Sydney than in Atlanta just four years earlier. The Olympic Team was older and drawn from a narrower class base than ever before. Critics noted an alarming drop in participation: from 1992 to 1998, adult participation fell from 45 to 38 per cent, and children were 40 per cent less active than 30 years earlier. The system was “running on fumes.” In response, a charismatic new sports minister, Denis Coderre, encouraged by an astute, experienced group of Quebec-based sports leaders, sought to revise the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act as a way of stimulating new government funding. The mastermind of the strategy was Jean-Guy Ouellet, an ebullient former dean of physical activity sciences at the University of Sherbrooke and veteran sports leader. Jean-Guy rose into influence during the build-up to the Montreal Olympics. He put his stamp on virtually every aspect of the developing Quebec sports system. He recruited me to help. When Paul DeVilliers replaced Coderre, Jean-Guy stayed as his advisor and the mandate remained the same. Jean-Guy and I shared the same ambitions for government in sport and we had similar views about how to navigate the endless, often unproductive meetings and the federal bureaucracy to make change. The legislation that was eventually enacted, the Physical Activity and Sport Act of 2003, provided new commitment to physical activity “as a fundamental right of health and well-being” and the pursuit of excellence. It also stated: The Government of Canada’s policy is founded on the highest ethical standards and values, including doping-free sport, the treatment of all persons with fairness and respect, the full and fair participation of all persons in sport and the fair, equitable, transparent and timely resolutions of disputes.

To realize the latter, the government created the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC), a federally funded,

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non-profit agency to provide quick, inexpensive alternate resolution for appeals and disputes, a huge step forward for athletes’ rights. The arbitrations, educational outreach, and policy advice of the SDRCC has significantly improved the fairness of decision making in Canadian sport. Another benefit of this moment of reform was a new federal-provincial-territorial (FPT) agreement called “The Canadian Sport Policy,” committing the senior governments to increasing participation, revitalizing school-based physical education, and strengthening capacity and coordination. Now in its second edition (until 2022), the Canadian Sport Policy provides a framework for FPT collaboration, coordination, and communication. Jean-Guy and I also pushed through new funding for peer-reviewed research into the determinants of sport participation, the most perplexing challenge facing policy makers today. The Sport Canada Research Initiative (SCRI) transfers $1 million annually to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council so that it can award grants to university researchers and doctoral students studying participation on the same competitive basis as other research grants. It funds an annual conference bringing researchers, policy makers, and practitioners together to share findings and successful interventions. It has dramatically increased the amount and quality of research The SDRCC, Canadian Sport Policy, and SCRI have all been important additions to the Canadian sports system. But the narrow focus on medals remains, reinforced by Vancouver/Whistler’s successful bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games and the new agency, Own the Podium. OTP allocates funds solely on the basis of the world list and the chance for medals. Although there are only a handful of participants in bobsled, for example, the sport’s perennial success earns it almost as much as basketball, with thousands of participants in every city in the country, many of whom are children and youth from immigrant and impoverished



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backgrounds. I don’t begrudge bobsled the financial support – in a winter country with a long history of the sliding sports, we should help Canadians compete with the best. But the funding formula should also reflect the social purpose of Canadian sports, including a sport’s resonance in the culture and the nature of participation. A big part of the problem is the relative scarcity of funding for sports overall. The Canadian Sport Policy has consistently failed to reach its participation targets. OTP rationalizes its approach with the assertion that medal winners inspire new participation. When my colleague Peter Donnelly actually studied the relationship, he found the reverse: despite a dramatic increase in Olympic medals during the last 25 years, sports participation has steadily declined. The two curves significantly diverge. While many winning performances do inspire children and youth, unless supportive opportunities are readily available, that inspiration quickly evaporates. When Peter interviewed leaders in the sports whose athletes had won Olympic medals during the survey period, only two of them indicated that they had even thought of taking advantage of their medal success to attract new participants. In neither case did they have capacity to do so. Clearly, the commitment to the “full and fair participation of all persons” needs much more than rhetoric. The cycle of promise and neglect has been especially evident in the area of gender equity. None of the post-Dubin initiatives in the early 1990s came with monitoring for compliance, and by the early 2000s there had been significant retreat. Phyllis was chair of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport (now Canadian Women and Sport). During the parliamentary hearings on the Physical Activity and Sport Act, she proposed a legislative requirement for gender equity along the lines of Title IX, the provision in the US Education Amendments Rights Act requiring all federally funded institutions to provide strict gender equity in their sports programs. In rejecting the proposal,

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minister DeVilliers promised to provide an accountability mechanism within Sport Canada. Sport Canada did place new reporting requirements upon the national organizations, but did not analyse those data to insist upon compliance. In 2018, when the FPT task force I co-chaired with Guylaine Demers conducted a national survey of women sports leaders, the most frequently aired complaint was the lack of effective monitoring for compliance. In his report on performance-enhancing drugs, Mr. Justice Dubin argued that the values of Canadian sport should reflect the best values of Canadian society. There’s much to be proud of, but the federal and provincial/territorial governments rarely look further than the sports bodies, and have neither the interest nor the capacity to include the majority who go without. It’s time to realize healthy sports for all.

22 RENEWING VARSITY

While many academics abhor academic leadership, dismissing it as soul-destroying “administration,” I sought it. Yes, there can be endless meetings, bitter turf wars, and the frustration of “herding cats,” coordinating bright people who want to be completely independent. But with careful strategy, the nurturing of relationships, and persistence, it’s amazing what you can achieve. The university is a vital institution, essential to a knowledge-based liberal-democratic society. I relished the opportunity to revitalize important programs and make change. I called myself a “public sector entrepreneur.” It meant putting research and teaching in physical and health education on a sound financial footing, bringing athletics under academic direction, and rebuilding the university’s facilities on the St. George campus. My chance to do this began in 1991, when the university appointed me director of the School of Physical and Health ­Education. In 1995, it gave me the added responsibility of directing the Department of Athletics and Recreation, the division that provided extra-curricular programs, services, and facilities. In 1998, I brought the two units together with the Graduate Program in Exercise Sciences to create the new Faculty of Physical Education and Health and became its first dean. Little did I realize that it would take 20 years of my life.

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STRENGTHENING THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF THE PHYSICALLY ACTIVE HUMAN When I assumed the leadership of the School in 1991, it faced a slew of challenges. While my predecessor, Roy Shephard, gave a tremendous boost to the School’s research productivity, largely through his own prodigious publication in exercise physiology, he was unable to reverse a series of disruptive financial cuts, roller-coaster enrolments, and facility challenges. By the late 1980s, the university leadership wondered out loud whether the School could continue on its own, whether it should be merged for its survival with a larger unit, or even closed. Academic physical education everywhere was in crisis. The traditional role of teacher preparation was falling out of favour. With the elimination of compulsory physical education in most schools, the demand had fallen dramatically. Some proposed that we drop it altogether. At the same time, burgeoning research in the behavioural, biophysical, and social sciences relating to sport and physical activity suggested many other directions. An increasing number of students sought careers in the health professions. Some faculties like ours renamed themselves “kinesiology,” but there was little consensus on what it meant. One burning debate was whether the changing field should focus on the instrumental sciences – ­­­exercise physiology, biomechanics, and psychology – a­nd/or incorporate the critical perspectives of the social sciences and humanities. Earle Zeigler, the founding dean of the Faculty of Physical Education at the University of Western Ontario, wrote that there were more than 200 different names for the units once associated with “physical education” across North America, including exercise sciences, human kinetics, and kinanthropology. Earle’s preference was “developmental physical activity.”



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Fortunately, I was able to tackle these issues with the support and advice of a bright, committed group of colleagues, including Gretchen Kerr, Mike Plyley, Brian Pronger, and Merrily Stratten, and a buoyant, engaged student leadership. We decided to define ourselves by a broad, multi-disciplinary program, with a focus on learning and leadership. We called it the best liberal arts education at U of T, with a professional focus. We carefully planned the sequence and coordination of courses – ­what now is called “curriculum mapping” – s­ o that both students and faculty could understand where every lesson fit into the overall degree, and we introduced a required course in learning skills so that students could develop an explicit understanding of how they best learned in different situations. The academic curriculum culminated in a philosophy course, developed and taught by Brian Pronger, that sought to give students confidence in what they knew, a healthy respect for what they did not know, and a commitment to lifelong learning. Instead of reducing the physical activity curriculum, as other universities had done, we actually increased it, shifting the emphasis from developing performance skills (e.g., sinking baskets) to imparting the skills of engaging others in healthy physical activity. To ensure that graduates who became teachers could sensitively address the demographic transformation of Ontario schools, we introduced courses on the games and dances of the Indigenous Peoples and the most recent immigrant and refugee populations (e.g., kabaddi, cricket, takraw, and bharatanatyam from India and South Asia), and programs for students with disabilities. To address the financial crisis, provost Adel Sedra helped us hire additional faculty and lower our enrolment to a much more manageable level. We persuaded the alumni to help us create new scholarships and financial awards for outstanding students. The spirit was “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

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RESTORING ATHLETICS The future was not as rosy for the Department of Athletics and Recreation (DAR). In December 1992, facing its own financial challenges, the university decided to eliminate financial support for any activity deemed “ancillary” to the academic mission, including athletics and recreation. Historically, U of T provided between 40 and 50 per cent of the athletic budget. By 1994, that would be zero. The decision forced layoffs of popular staff, a reduction in programs and hours of operation, and a doubling of the compulsory student athletic fee. DAR also announced that it would close Varsity Stadium, which had served the university, region, and national sports community as a major venue for almost a century, and monetize the property. It would drastically reduce the offerings in intercollegiate sport from 42 to 14, eliminating men’s football, women’s ice hockey, and 26 other teams and high-performance programs. It would cancel the popular children’s camps it had conducted for many years in gymnastics, diving, and synchronized swimming, and close the gymnasium dedicated to Olympic gymnastics. The announcement unleashed a firestorm of protests. DAR was already under a cloud of mistrust because of annual fee increases and its awkward response to gender equity. The proposed cuts brought many other groups into the fray. The athletic alumni, many of whom held prominent positions in the business community and the professions, called for the resignation of university president Rob Prichard and athletic director Ian McGregor. With the simultaneous attack on men’s football and women’s hockey, both teams with storied reputations, the announcement united the men’s and women’s alumni like never before. The proposed reduction in children’s programming had the community up in arms. Even the stodgy City of Toronto Department of Parks and Recreation complained that the loss of U of T’s gymnastics



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program would leave a huge hole in the sequence of opportunities in the sport. Perhaps most seriously, the fee increases turned the student organizations into mortal enemies, with generation after generation of student leaders voting down athletic budgets. While I could well understand their opposition to fee increases, some of their arguments drove me crazy. The Graduate Students’ Union said it would never vote for anything that supported intercollegiate athletics, on the grounds that sport competitions were “elitist.” It troubled me that students who represented an equally small meritocratic cohort, who competed for admission, grades, scholarships, publications, and jobs, could condemn fellow students who pursued excellence in sports in much the same way. Their opposition illustrated the extent to which athletics had fallen out of favour among many in the student body. I jumped into these politics. I was opposed to the reduction in opportunities and fearful that the university might eliminate sports altogether. Some members of Governing Council suggested that the university sub-contract athletics to the YMCA or a private corporation. Such a step would remove it entirely from educational oversight. I was determined to maintain as many sports and teams as possible. In the weeks that followed, in public meetings, private caucuses, and corridor conversations, I worked to build a coalition around a broadly based program. I argued that if the ultimate purpose of intercollegiate sports was educational, providing students with a rewarding complement to the classroom, library, and lab, then Canada’s largest university should maximize opportunities, not reduce them. Even if resources were scarce, I said, it was better to play poor than not at all. The football alumni proved to be vital allies. They said they would financially contribute to any rescue operation, forming a group called the Friends of Football. Although we had once

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shouted at each other – ­a decade previously, I had called for the elimination of football on grounds of safety and cost – I­ knew many of them from my undergraduate days, respected them, and felt it was better to have them “inside the tent” than blasting us from the outside. It would be extremely divisive to single any sport out for elimination, when what was required was a unified campaign to save all intercollegiate sports. Gradually, with students and alumni from football, women’s hockey, and rowing in the lead, we built support for the broadly based program. Student leader Peter Koutroumpis (now a senior lecturer in physical education at North Carolina State University) ably steered the various motions through the Council of Athletics and Recreation. We saved all sports facing elimination, within a framework of gender equity and three-tiered financial support. In a remarkable coda to that emotional year, the football team won the 1993 national championship, the Vanier Cup, in a tight game with Calgary in Toronto’s SkyDome. In the years that followed, I built upon the Friends of Football’s initiative and started to fund-raise for every team. While it has always troubled me that the university withdrew base budget support for athletics, I didn’t see that changing anytime soon. I reluctantly came to accept that in the neo-liberal economy, when governments everywhere were reducing per capita expenditures to higher education and cutting taxes for the wealthy, universities had to convince alumni and those very rich individuals to contribute. The risk is that powerful donors shape the purpose of programs. The trick is to ensure that academic priorities remain paramount, as the University of Toronto has always insisted. To head up fund-raising, I brought back Robin Campbell, an extremely successful former swim coach and administrator. Robin and I first worked together in the 1960s to raise funds for U of T athletes participating in the World Student Games. We decided



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to create endowments for every sport, an idea I had first heard at Harvard. While the strategy of endowments (investing and protecting the principal, only using the interest payments for program expenditures) meant low annual payouts, the benefit was income in perpetuity. Sceptics told us that it would never work in Canada – ­people expected the university to pay for sport – ­but Robin was inexhaustible. Adel Sedra gave us $2 million in matching funds to get us started, and the university’s vice president of advancement, former football star Jon Dellandrea, steered donors our way. Gradually, the campaign was persuasive. Today, 10 per cent of the entire athletic budget comes from endowments and other forms of fund-raising. In 1995, Adel took me aside and asked whether, if there was a change of leadership, I would be willing to serve as athletic director. When I said yes, he asked what I would think about merging the School and DAR into a single faculty. I gave him a hug. Bringing the academic and athletic programs under integrated leadership was something I had always felt necessary. The change did not occur for several months, but in the fall of that year, Adel appointed me acting director of athletics and recreation, with a mandate for the merger.

THE MERGER Effectively integrating different organizations with proud histories and distinct cultures is never easy. Richard Peddie was the founding president and chief operating officer of Maple Leaf Sport and Entertainment (MLSE), which operates the Leafs, Raptors, Marlies, Toronto Football Club, and Argonauts. He once told me that merging the conservative, white, misogynist culture of the Leafs with the innovative, racially diverse approach of the Raptors was one of the hardest things he ever had to do.

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Merging SPHE and DAR was almost as difficult. Faculty feared that a closer association with “the jocks” would lower their status, athletic staff that we were pointy-heads who hated sports. In an age of increasing specialization, most colleagues simply wanted to be left alone to pursue their self-defined projects. The trend across Canada was towards separation, not integration. When I told my friend Peter Donnelly at McMaster, where the faculty had successfully fought to break away from athletics, he immediately asked, “Would your successor thank you?” I was convinced it was the right thing to do. I had always believed that a professional program like physical and health education could benefit enormously from the living laboratory that DAR provided and vice versa. It would be a “teaching health centre,” with “research informing teaching informing practice informing research” and so on. Adel was an engineer well accustomed to experiential education. He told everyone that it was a “no brainer.” The merger would enable us to bring athletics under an explicitly educational framework. I have always believed that a university’s involvement in intercollegiate sports can only be justified if the student athletes’ participation demonstrably contributes to their overall education. That required academic leadership, explicit learning outcomes, ongoing research, and coaches with educational accomplishments. While fully aware of the community-building aspects of sports – ­I have spent my life encouraging attendance at Varsity Blues games and events – ­programs should stand or fall on the basis of their educational benefits. When intercollegiate sports become another form of “sport for sport’s sake,” they become detached from the educational mission of the university. In such cases, they should be given back to the students to run themselves, or abandoned altogether.



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The economic and political arguments for the merger were also compelling. It would give the School access to the much greater resources and better services of the Department, and academic legitimacy to the much-embarrassed Department. Those arguments mattered little to those who saw their traditional roles about to change, however, and I faced considerable resistance. Change management is a complex, delicate task. My approach was to stay upbeat; provide clear, comprehensive, and constant direction; and engage colleagues and students in the design of the details, drawing upon the relationships I had developed over the years. It was like conducting an election campaign that never stopped. It was exhausting. We also had to part company with several determinedly negative voices. Years later, a group of students from the Rotman School of Management who conducted an evaluation of the merger told me that I would have been more successful if I had fired even more. Fortunately, I enjoyed the support of an influential group of faculty, led by Gretchen Kerr and Merrily Stratten and including Jack Goodman, Mike Plyley, Doug Richards, and Scott Thomas; coaches Kristine Drakich and Carl Georgevski; and senior staff Paul Carson, Liz Hoffman, Karen Lewis, and Kyle Winters. To bring people together, we created several new faculty-wide initiatives, including an integrated leadership development office to train students in both academic and co-curricular programs. To put the marginal status of an “ancillary” behind us, we banished the term, “extra-curricular” and coined “co-curricular” to re-establish the centrality of athletics to the university’s educational mission. The new entity included the Graduate Program in Exercise Sciences, which was taught by PHE faculty but administered in the Faculty of Medicine on the other side of campus. The merger enabled us to bring it home. The Faculty of Physical Education and Health became a reality on January 1, 1998.

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ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS Making the culture of intercollegiate sports more explicitly educational, however, was a much more elusive challenge. It was not that student athletes were uninterested in their studies; on the contrary, as a cohort, they generally achieved higher academic averages and graduation rates than the U of T average. But the culture of intercollegiate sports had little to do with the university experience – ­it could have occurred anywhere. Both coaches and athletes defined their activities in terms of high performance, with a focus on winning, increasing resources, and devoting more time to training and competition. They emulated national teams, the NCAA, and professional sports, not the culture of a Canadian university. In his 1996 report on men’s hockey at l’Université de Moncton, Ken Dryden observed that the players had little in common with other students, estimating that no more than 10 per cent of their experiences were similar to those of other students. He wistfully suggested that student athletes should have 90 per cent of the formative experiences other students have. Studies at U of T indicate that only in the final years of the undergraduate degree do some student athletes begin to take advantage of the full range of opportunities provided by the university. I developed a formal pedagogy and learning objectives for intercollegiate sports and educationally focused performance evaluations for coaches. I banned hazing and encouraged coaches to create constructive, educationally focused forms of orientation and team building. I persuaded the university to give coaches faculty status. Yet I faced daily resistance. When I tried to encourage coaches to include field trips and cultural and intercultural experiences on road trips, what I had always sought as an athlete myself, both coaches and students looked at me as if I was deranged.



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For me it was a tragedy. The rest of the university fund-raised and dug into scarce budgets to give students travel experiences, while intercollegiate sports enjoyed them in abundance and made no use of them. While coaches welcomed the involvement of research colleagues who helped them improve performance, they had no time for anyone who tried to study or contribute to other outcomes. The best coaches told me gently that I was being unrealistic, that while they certainly tried to instill progressive values and academic ambition in their charges, they only had time for the Xs and Os. They felt that they would be heavily criticized by students, alumni, their peers, and the media if they did anything else but recruit and prepare winning teams. The problem was that even Canada’s largest university could not change the hegemonic culture of high-performance sports and “sport for sport’s sake.” Studies show that Ontario high school students know more about the NCAA than the excellent programs conducted on their doorsteps. Despite decades of documented exploitation by the NCAA, and a steady stream of student athletes returning to Canada after unhappy experiences south of the border, the cachet of a US “athletic scholarship” still remains higher than admission to an excellent university in Canada. Even the high school sports writer for the nationalist Toronto Star, David Grossman, promoted the idea that it was better to attend a US university for sports than a Canadian.1 The debate about “athletic scholarships” was particularly acute. While American universities have been offering tuition, living expenses, and privileged admission to promising athletes since the late 19th century, Canadian universities long resisted the practice, insisting that only the academically qualified receive admission and only top students and those in financial need receive financial assistance. But in 1981, four of the five conferences in the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union pushed through a limited form of financial aid in recognition of athletic ability. Student

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athletes could receive up to a maximum of $1,500 (which at the time was the national average for undergraduate tuition in arts and sciences) after they had successfully completed one year of university study. Ontario universities refused to grant such assistance but, in exchange for the continuing prohibition of entrance awards, stayed within the Union. The compromise satisfied no one. By the time I became responsible for U of T athletics in 1995, the debate dominated the pan-Canadian discussion. Western, Quebec, and Atlantic universities wanted unlimited financial assistance, including entrance awards, while those who rejected scholarships threatened to break away from the CIAU to form an independent, anti-scholarship organization. The fault lines were similar to those that had divided Canadian amateur sport since the 1920s, when leaders from the West and the Atlantic provinces began seeking liberalization and those in Ontario bitterly opposed it. But by the end of the 20th century, the Ontario consensus was breaking down. A growing number of Ontario coaches, athletic directors, students, and alumni wanted athletic awards, while most university presidents continued to oppose them. I had always opposed athletic scholarships. I had always felt that the Canadian university system should provide free education for every qualified student, and failing that, generous financial assistance for all those who demonstrate financial need, not just needy athletes. When I called for living stipends for Canada’s best athletes, in what became Sport Canada’s Athlete Assistance Program, I argued that such support should be granted regardless of the athlete’s educational status. They could receive tuition support, I said, but school, college, or university attendance should not be a requirement for the award. In short, I had always tried to keep a student’s athletic ability out of the calculation for educationally based financial support, and participation in formal education separate from the determination of carded athlete assistance.



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When athletic ability becomes the major criterion for educationally based financial assistance, there are too many opportunities for abuse. When students and their parents asked me about athletic scholarships at U of T, I directed them to the university’s extensive program of financial assistance for all students, the most generous in Canada. Yet I was losing this debate. It was harder to get prospective student athletes, their parents, coaches, and friends to understand the distinctions I was making, let alone pursue the other forms of financial assistance available at U of T. They thought we were niggardly and, in many cases, stopped considering U of T altogether. At the same time, I was increasingly concerned about the future of the pan-Canadian network of Canadian interuniversity sports. Simon Fraser University had already joined the NCAA over the scholarship issue, and there were rumblings that other universities might do the same. A CIAU was inconceivable without the major Ontario universities. In 1999, I decided to change course and work for a form of athletic scholarships that we could live with. It was one of the hardest decisions of my career. With Liz Hoffman, U of T’s distinguished leader for intercollegiate sports, I prepared the senior administration on the need for the change, and then lobbied the other Ontario universities to join us. In the pan-Canadian negotiations that followed, we indicated our willingness to support financial awards equivalent to the full cost of tuition on the conditions that (1) ­entrance awards would continue to be prohibited, (2) a minimum of a B average would be required for upper-year awards, (3) gender equity would apply to all awards, even those completely funded by the alumni, and (4) eligible students had to live at least two years in the province where they attended university. In the end, we only got a truncated version of these conditions in revised rules – ­gender equity, but entrance awards for students with an

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80 per cent average graduating from high school, and continuing awards for anyone with a 65 per cent average. The new rules have made the entire system more expensive, increasing pressures to limit the number of sports and exacerbating the inequalities between universities. With the devastating disruptions brought about by COVID-19, the model has become even more unsustainable. Today, ten years after stepping down from my responsibilities for athletics, I believe that major change is more necessary than ever. Universities should develop innovative ways to engage every student in healthy physical activity, as a contribution to stress reduction and population health. Intercollegiate programs should be reconnected to the educational mission with an intersectional gender lens, so that both leadership and participation reflect the composition of the student body. Programs should impart equity awareness, leadership, and community development skills, so that teams of students and alumni can fan out into impoverished neighbourhoods to overcome the huge deficits in participation. None of these ideas is new, but rarely have they been tried. Now is the time.

VARSITY CENTRE Once a cathedral of Canadian sports, Varsity Stadium, the university’s century-old, 22,000-seat facility in downtown Toronto, was falling down. Percy Williams and Ira Murchison had set world records there. The Varsity Blues football team had always played their games there. Once the Argonauts called it home. It had been the site of 30 Grey Cups; 20 Vanier Cups; national, provincial, and city track and field championships; international soccer games, including the Olympic qualifying tournament in 1976; and a world lacrosse championship. John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Chuck Berry, and Eric Clapton played concerts there.



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Yet despite the growth in the student body, the crowds that flocked to intercollegiate games in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s no longer attended Varsity games, and the Argos moved to CNE Stadium. DAR no longer had the revenue to maintain it properly. While we could still use the playing field, the fire marshal ordered us to close off the seats. In 2002, I had to tear it down. In its 1996 master plan for the St. George campus, the university announced that it would redevelop the Varsity site for other purposes, leasing the Bloor Street frontage for commerce, and creating alternative athletic facilities on the southern portion of the site. “The existing stadium is ugly,” vice president Michael Finlayson told the Globe and Mail. “It’s a waste of land,” campus planner Elizabeth Sisam said.2 Michael and Elizabeth were valued colleagues, but those were fighting words. Varsity Stadium was a second home to me. I had been attending games, running, and teaching there since the early 1950s. I loved its tight-cornered cinder track and the closed-in feel it gave spectators, and still enjoyed the many relationships I had built there. When my late mother suffered from confusion during her last years, she would call me from her apartment in the Beach and ask for directions to Varsity Stadium. “If I can get to Varsity,” she’d say, “I’ll know my way home.” Varsity was a lodestar in our lives. I was convinced that the university still needed a stadium for major events. It drove me crazy that people said that the Bloor Street frontage was too valuable for sports, or that with the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Royal Ontario Museum next door, the street should be reserved for culture. Wasn’t sport culture? Without money to do anything different, I had to bite my tongue. During the decade that followed, I bobbed and weaved continually, with countless sleepless nights, to find a solution that would enhance – ­ not reduce – ­ opportunities for sport and physical

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activity. My strategy was to insist upon the facilities we needed while being flexible and cooperative in working with Michael and Elizabeth towards an acceptable design. I kept my options open, proposing either a new civic stadium to share with a professional team, with 15,000–20,000 seats, or a more intimate stadium with capacity to accommodate the smaller audiences the Blues were then drawing. What was not negotiable was the 400-metre track, a CFL-sized field, and, if the 70-year-old adjoining Varsity Arena was to come down as well, an NHL- or Olympic-sized ice rink. We needed it for student sports and physical activity. We faced two sizeable constraints. The university insisted that either commercial development or donations provide the revenue to build and operate new athletic facilities. The site was very tight, so much so that it would have been impossible to replicate the old stadium under the zoning regulations of the day. The only way that we could combine a sports facility with a commercial property was through a complicated, stacked design. There were few options we did not consider. Michael was generous in paying for the best possible architectural and engineering advice. We invited proposals for commercial development, and considered a hotel, a condominium, a cinema, and a shopping plaza. We vetted proposals from the Leafs, Raptors, and Argonauts. We considered tearing down and rebuilding Varsity Arena underground to create more space. We explored “just in time” hydraulic seating that could be reconfigured with a touch of a button to serve sports, lectures, or concerts. We travelled across North America and Europe to investigate what others had done in similar situations. There were many dramatic moments. One plan called for the field and track to be turned 90 degrees to an east-west configuration and buried under a hotel. It would remove all our visibility, but it did meet our bare requirements. My colleagues and I agreed to accept it, but very reluctantly. We felt we had no other



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choice. Then it came up for approval at Governing Council. After I had mumbled my heavy-hearted support, Peter Herrndorf asked me to comment again, saying, “I am sure Professor Kidd is being a good soldier and going along with the Administration’s plan, but could he tell us what he really thinks?” President Rob Prichard replied that he had no difficulty having me speak honestly about the proposal. I answered that it would be an extremely tight fit and an embarrassment to a great university with such a distinguished athletic tradition. Rob immediately withdrew the motion and we went back to the drawing board. Another plan that gained serious traction called for a new student residence to wrap around the athletic facilities. It required a student capital contribution, which in turn required a student referendum. Liz Hoffman, other colleagues, and I canvassed the entire campus, but we lost by a large margin. When alumnus Robert Birgeneau was appointed president in 2000, I flew to Boston, where he was dean of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to enlist his help. Bob was tremendously supportive, but insisted that we focus on a new civic stadium. After all his US experience, he just could not understand how a major university could do without a large stadium. So we went back to the Argos, and because the 2007 men’s under-20 world soccer championship was to be held in Canada, with the final in Toronto, lobbied the federal and provincial governments for capital contributions. It would have been a beautiful stadium; we quickly came to a workable agreement with the Argos and we got promises of money from the senior governments. But the footprint would have taken the adjoining street and part of a parking lot slated for university expansion. The plans infuriated academics at Trinity and Massey Colleges and residents in the nearby neighbourhoods. The public meetings held to discuss the design were among the most raucous I have ever attended, with colleagues and residents lining up at the mikes to scream that spectator

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sports had no place at a modern university. When I pointed out to Trinity provost (and renowned historian) Margaret Macmillan that sporting events had been held there for more than a century, long before her college had moved to its current site, she replied: “Yes, but some things we don’t want to bring back, like capital punishment and intercollegiate sports!” By 2005, Bob Birgeneau had left U of T to become chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Frank Iacobucci, a former Supreme Court justice, dean of law, and provost at U of T, was appointed interim president. Frank quickly decided that the debate over Varsity was becoming too divisive. He cancelled the project. He then announced that we could have the entire site for sport and physical activity and that the university would pay for a small stadium. It was brilliant. We will always be in Frank’s debt for his intervention. Frank’s decision enabled us to build a full-sized soccer and CFL field and a complete track and field facility with almost 5,000 seats overhanging Varsity Arena. It was beautifully designed by Don Schmitt of Diamond Schmitt Architects, open to the street on two sides. Liz Hoffman scoured the world to ensure that we got the best surfaces for students to play on, and eventually we got the highest FIFA and IAAF certifications. Even though we lost the $35  million the governments had promised – ­it went to what is now BMO Field at the CNE – w ­ e could plan the site without frantic worry over money. We opened the new Varsity Stadium in 2007. We brought back international track on June 11, 2009, with an invitational meet featuring Olympic champion Usain Bolt before a sold-out crowd. It poured, but no one left their seat as Bolt cruised to a 10 flat time in the 100 metres. Frank’s decision paved the way for another beneficial allocation of university land for sport and physical activity. Student enrolment on the St. George campus had doubled since the last new



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building had opened in 1979. We were desperate for more workout and competition facilities and the associated infrastructure. We had been twisting ourselves into knots to find more room, behind, above, and below Varsity Arena. Then one day, provost Vivek Goel simply said, “This is crazy, we have a parking lot across the street, let’s build there.” That enabled us to build two more essential facilities, The Pavilion, on the south side of the track, and the multi-purpose research, teaching, performance, and exercise Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport on the west side of Devonshire Place. The Goldring Centre was completed under my successor, Ira Jacobs, with funds from the Goldring family, the provincial government, and a successful fund-raising campaign led by Robin Campbell. Today, my heart soars when I walk by the Varsity complex. It’s available to all students, as well as faculty, staff, and members of the public. Any passerby can watch all manner of sport and exercise in both the stadium and Goldring and hear the shouts of joy and excitement among the participants. It’s a powerful affirmation that sport and physical activity thrive at Canada’s largest university.

23 A NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT

“If you love something, teach it to a friend.” That was one of my mother’s favourite sayings. It drives my engagement with the inspiring international movement the United Nations calls “sport for development and peace” (SDP). I’ve advocated for its recognition and funding, volunteered as a program leader and policy advisor, and written and taught about it. SDP seeks to bring sports to the poorest people in the world and to marshal the power of sports to the world’s most difficult challenges beyond sports, including infant mortality, non-communicabl disease, and gender inequality. It connects people around the world in powerful ways. During the last 30 years, a diverse array of entrepreneurial individuals, international and national sports bodies, governments, non-governmental bodies, and corporations have created new organizations and programs to advance this. Commonwealth Games Canada sends physical educators and former athletes to train coaches and contribute to HIV and AIDS awareness, gender equity, and maternal health in Africa and the Caribbean. Athlete-led Right to Play uses sports to empower vulnerable children in refugee camps in Africa and Asia and some of the most frightening war zones in the Middle East. Today, there are more than 1,000 organizations making similar efforts.



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While usually presented as a First World initiative, some of the very best programs originated in the Global South. The Nairobi-based Mathare Youth Sports Association promotes soccer as a vehicle for the inclusion of girls and women, school retention, and environmental clean-up, while Cuba trains coaches and grassroots sports leaders in more than 50 countries. It’s truly a global movement, with abundant cross-cultural learning. A coalition of international organizations attempts to tie these efforts to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations and measure and publish the results as a way of improving their effectiveness. SDP is one of the most encouraging developments in international sports I’ve ever seen. My involvement began in the last stages of the anti-apartheid campaign. In September 1990, while the South African government was negotiating with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress about a formal end to apartheid, the leaders of the sports campaign met in Stockholm to discuss next steps. SANROC’s Sam Ramsamy called upon First World countries to finance sports for the disadvantaged majority of South African society as “reparations” for the super profits extracted by apartheid. The Zimbabwe Olympic leader, Tomas Sithole, called for comparable assistance to Angola, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. If South Africa alone received assistance, he argued, it would quickly run up the score against the nearby countries that had supported it so unselfishly during apartheid. I gave full support to their appeals. In addition to the justice of reparations, it had always troubled me that the anti-apartheid strategy required us to say “no” when the culture of sport is to say “yes.” With sports assistance, we could contribute in positive ways. Others in Canada felt the same. Two in particular were Roy McMurtry, then an associate chief justice of the Ontario Superior Court, and Anne Hillmer, the senior sports policy officer for the

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Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. I knew Roy as a fellow U of T athletic alumnus. He had been captain of the football team in the 1950s and we often encountered each other in the alumni locker room at Hart House. We shared the conviction that sports could contribute to personal and community development. I admired his effort to criminalize hockey violence when he was Ontario attorney general in the 1970s and his staunch opposition to apartheid when he was Canadian high commissioner to the UK in the 1980s. Anne was a whirling dervish of ideas and energy. She could navigate the impenetrable federal bureaucracy and the bewildering alphabet soup of international sport with equal aplomb, and she supported the anti-apartheid campaign as far as she could get away with. By the mid-1980s, she was sending money to SANROC and the non-racial sports organizations within South Africa. Initially, we sought to interest the Commonwealth Secretariat in creating such a program. It should have been a natural fit. The Commonwealth countries had played a crucial role in the anti-apartheid struggle, were rhetorically committed to broad economic and social development, and shared a common language and a long history of friendly relations in sports. A Commonwealth program, with leaders and young volunteers drawn from many countries and every region, linked to the Commonwealth Games, could improve opportunities in sports and help strengthen the understanding between the many diverse cultures. In 1991, Roy and Anne persuaded the Commonwealth secretary general, the Nigerian diplomat Emeka Anyaoku, to establish the Commonwealth Committee for Cooperation in Sport to pursue the idea, with Roy as chair. But within the permanent staff, the proposal was met by (in Roy’s words) “a stampede of cold feet.” Australia and the UK preferred to go their own way. If Canada wanted such a program, we would have to do it on our own. In the summer of 1992, Roy began convening meetings in his office at Osgoode Hall for that purpose. Fellow plotters were Anne



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Hillmer, Dick Pound, Geoff Gowan of the Coaching Association of Canada, Ann Peel, chair of the Canadian Athletes’ Association (now AthletesCAN), and Judy Kent of Commonwealth Games Canada (CGC). We felt that Sport Canada could easily mount such a program, modelling it on the experiences of Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), with financial contributions from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The plan was to send both recent university graduates and experienced professionals to deliver “sport aid” in the African, Asian, and Caribbean Commonwealth countries. While CIDA was prepared to contribute, Sport Canada was reluctant to take it on, fearing that it would detract from its mission of high-performance sport. Instead, it asked CGC to create and manage such a program on a cost-recovery basis. CGC agreed, and in 1993, the Commonwealth Sport Development Program (CSDP) was born. I became a member of the management committee, and in 2001, the chair. Within a few years, the CSDP was conducting activities in 22 Commonwealth countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, with offices in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, and Barbados. We stayed out of South Africa, because it was already swamped with offers of sport assistance. We sought to strengthen leadership and coaching and create new programs for girls and women and persons with disabilities. An early success was the Caribbean Coaching Certification Program, modelled on the National Coaching Certification Program in Canada. Within a decade, it had trained and certified 326 coaches, 43 community sports leaders, 51 course conductors, 12 master course conductors, and four trainers. We soon found that “sport aid” was insufficient. Working within established sports, we could only reach the few already involved, and we faced considerable pressure to shift resources to the top teams. Poverty, malnutrition, disease, and other conditions of underdevelopment prevented the overwhelming majority of citizens

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from participating at all. The lesson was that to enhance participation in sports we first had to enhance overall social development. The penny dropped when two CSDP staff, Joe Van Ryn and Nora Sheffe, undertook a community consultation in Zimbabwe about the needs of women in sport. Instead of the assistance to national sports bodies they had expected to provide, they heard repeatedly that the most urgent priority was to address the health challenges women faced in rural communities, especially the high rates of neonatal and infant mortality. In consultation with those women, they developed an aerobics program for pregnant and lactating women. They conducted it in rural health centres where women could meet with health professionals and access other social services. It became an instant success and quickly spread across the country. At the same time, in the face of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, we joined a coalition of African and international partners called “Kicking AIDS Out” to combat the stigmatization of persons with HIV and AIDS and teach about healthy sex. While we still did some “sport development,” the focus became “development through sport,” using sport to enable overall social change, whether or not it had any impact upon organized participation. We signalled this pivot with a new name: “International Development through Sport.” In 2003, the United Nations coined the term “sport for development and peace” to refer to the same ambition. We eventually adopted the UN’s term. From the beginning, young people were eager to contribute. In 2001, we created the Canadian Sports Leadership Corps to train and deploy national team athletes and recent graduates in physical education to these programs. An early partner was Physically Active Youth in Namibia, where the rates of high school drop-out, HIV and AIDS, and gender-based violence among teenagers were disturbingly high. PAY combined a rich mix of sports, dance, fitness, and outdoor education with remedial academic training and



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courses in healthy sexuality and healthy relationships in an effort to turn these trends around. Canadian volunteers led many aspects of the program. Most of the former drop-outs soon graduated from high school, found jobs, or entered university. Some of them became leaders in the program. Others were doing much the same. By 2000, the number of programs simply exploded, inspired by the mass mobilizations to “Make Poverty History,” the worldwide growth in athlete activism, and the neo-liberal emphasis upon entrepreneurship. In 2003, the United Nations began to integrate SDP with its efforts to accelerate major social and economic development, specifically the eight Millennium Development Goals. (After 2015, the MDGs were expanded to the 17 SDGs.) In 2005, the London bid for the 2012 Olympics promised to help 12 million inactive youth in 20 different countries take up sport in a program called “International Inspiration.” Although it took longer than planned, it delivered. One of my heroes in SDP was the late Zambian physical educator Musheke Kakuwa. After graduate training in Cuba, Musheke had the choice of working in high-performance or grassroots sport; he chose the latter, eventually becoming head of the physical education faculty at the University of Zambia. Whether it was in a classroom or sports field, in southern Africa or Ontario, he could animate enthusiastic physical activity and give everyone the skills and confidence to participate. I’ve never seen anyone who could achieve so much with so little. Nothing flustered him. Once, we arrived at a training site to discover that all the arrangements we had painstakingly made the night before had been mistakenly taken down. I was devastated, but he took my hands and said, “Let the day mature.” He then organized the participants into work teams to get us started. It turned out to be a productive day. Musheke nurtured an entire generation of Zambian sport leaders and physical educators to take up sport for development. At a time when HIV and AIDS was devastating Zambia, with one in

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five infected, he turned traditional Zambian games into a curriculum of healthy sexuality (to reduce the spread of the virus) and anti-stigmatization (to combat discrimination against those with HIV and AIDS and normalize testing). The use of games deeply rooted in the culture enabled the curriculum to be taught in both urban and rural areas and shared across the generations. Musheke persuaded the Zambian government to make it compulsory and then prepared teachers, supervisors, and inspectors to deliver it across the country. The University of Toronto connection helped in the lobbying for this decree. Musheke and his colleagues in the Ministry of Education, Lazarous Kalirani and Abigail Tuchili, had prepared the ground, arranging for Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa to address the teacher training workshop in Lusaka planned to roll out the new curriculum. But the president’s staff kept striking out the commitment to a mandated program in his drafted remarks. So Musheke arranged an appointment with the minister of education, Dr. Brian Chituwo, in hopes that Chituwo would persuade the president. The meeting started slowly, with the minister clearly distracted. At one point, he looked at my card sceptically and said: “The only thing I know about the University of Toronto is that the dean of the UNZA medical school and the father of pediatrics in Zambia, the revered Dr. Chifumbe Chintu, took his professional training there in the 1960s.” Chifumbe and I had been track teammates at U of T and we had had dinner together the previous night. I was able to tell the minister that Chifumbe supported making the curriculum compulsory. Then he looked at the card of my U of T colleague, Donald Njelesani, and asked whether he was related to the World Health Organization official Dr. Evarist Njelesani, with whom he had attended medical school. “That’s my father,” Donald replied, “and he supports a compulsory project too.” We immediately had Chituwo’s attention, and in a few minutes, he agreed to take our proposal to the president.



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Several days later, Mwanawasa announced that the curriculum would become compulsory. Like my other sports passions, SDP is not without its politics and contradictions. There’s a kaleidoscope of motivations and interventions. Despite the best efforts of the United Nations and others to bring about collaboration and ethical standards, there’s more competition between programs than cooperation. NGOs and corporations vie with each other for branding, donors, and participants. In Lusaka, I met children who had been trained by seven different programs while their counterparts 20 ­kilometres outside the city were completely ignored. Many programs spend most of their funds upon photo ops. There is very little sustainability. There’s often a fierce fight over budgets. The high-performance community scorns SDP as a waste of precious resources while those in mainstream development condemn us as “bread and circuses.” At Commonwealth Games Canada, some board members tried to divert the money from Sport Canada into other projects. The most serious dilemma is that good will is insufficient to ensure an equitable, effective outcome. Unless the intended recipients are actively involved in the design, delivery, monitoring, and evaluation, there is no guarantee that programs will be effective. This takes time, experience in the community, and a lot of careful listening, which many programs fail to do. While “no decisions about us without us” is a widely accepted rule of thumb for community development, it’s a very hard lesson for sports people, especially those with an entrepreneurial spirit. Sports teaches confidence, determination, and a refusal to hear “no,” yet those commendable attributes lead many to rush in without a needs analysis, reproducing the domination and colonialism that created the inequality in the first place. I’ve met high school principals in Africa struggling with uninvited volunteers who had been turned loose on their schools. “Why should teachers in the Global

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South be expected to babysit and train wealthy teenagers from the First World when they don’t have enough resources for their own students?” one of them asked. There are excellent programs. The worst exploit vulnerable communities to give rich kids a feel-good form of tourism. These problems are not unique to SDP, as countless critiques of other forms of development have documented. But they undermined our effectiveness and hurt our legitimacy. It was in response to these challenges that I moved into advocacy mode. One imperative was to show the sceptics that SDP is effective, through monitoring, evaluation, and research. At an early conference in New York, Carol Bellamy, the executive director of UNICEF, gave us further reason to do this. Since the US administration of George W. Bush had declared war against rights-based approaches to public policy, we needed to protect ourselves with evidence-based arguments. In 2006, Peter Donnelly and I won a contract from the International Working Group on Sport for Development to review the best available literature and make recommendations for policy and practice. We recruited a team of colleagues and graduate students from U of T, including Simon Darnell, Cassandra Wells, and Jay Coakley (University of Colorado); David Zakus and Donald Njelesani; June Larkin, Sabrina Razack, and Fiona Moola; Penny Parnes and Goli Hashemi; and Maggie MacDonnell. Our reading confirmed the benefits of SDP, but with urgent cautions. SDP has enhanced the education, health, and well-being of participants. Sports can be especially effective in reaching young people not attracted by other interventions, and build inter-generational networks. But the literature reinforced what I’ve always believed: positive outcomes from sport are possible but not automatic. Sports programs must be conducted in responsible, culturally appropriate ways, with explicit community participation in decision making. Leadership is key.



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Many programs popular with the white, First World middle class turn away those from different backgrounds. Programmers must reach out to those not already engaged, ask what they want and what barriers they face, and work with them to design and implement solutions. Participants must feel safe, valued, socially connected, and hopeful, so it takes more than sports. The best programs are linked to education, health, and employment and sustained for many years. These findings provided the basis for our recommendations to governments and NGOs, and contributed to the ongoing research, university-level teaching, program development, and monitoring and evaluation that have occurred in the years since. While there is no guarantee that programs today are planned and carried out knowledgeably and responsibly, there is far more likelihood that they will be. In 2005, I was appointed to the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport (CABOS), which advises the Commonwealth Secretariat and the 54 Commonwealth countries on sports policy. In 2009, I succeeded Dame Sue Campbell from the UK as chair, serving until 2014. While CABOS provided advice on many thorny issues, including doping, match fixing, and the penchant of sports bodies to thumb their noses at the governments who funded them under the banner of “the autonomy of sport,” we focused on sports for development. It was both a glorious adventure and bizarre. The Commomonwealth Secretariat is housed in Marlborough House in London, a former palace kept pretty much as it was when the current queen’s grandparents lived there, with floor-to-ceiling paintings of red-coated British troops bayonetting various enemies, hardly supportive of the Commonwealth’s goals of “development, democracy and peace,” and a royal dog cemetery in the back garden. In the early years, we faced bewildering, crazy-making contradictions between the Commonwealth’s stated enthusiasm for sport and the actual help we received.

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One challenge was the Secretariat’s preoccupation with political matters, diplomacy, and trade, which tied up most of the staff. Even education and health received very little attention. Another was the bitter resistance of the staff of the small youth department, on whom we were dependent for implementation, who disputed the idea that sport could contribute to development, and feared that we would take all their money. Sue and I focused on winning the good will of secretaries general, using the Commonwealth communications department to publicize success stories, and getting affirming resolutions through the bi-annual meetings of the prime ministers and sports ministers. We fought an ongoing guerilla war with the bureaucrats. I had my greatest success with Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma, who loved cricket, “got” the benefit of SDP, and supported it at the highest level. In 2011, he persuaded the Commonwealth prime ministers to elevate the priority of SDP and make it a stand-alone department within the Secretariat. In recent years, under the leadership of Louise Martin, who succeeded me as chair, and head of SDP Oliver Dudfield, the Secretariat has conducted a number of encouraging demonstration projects, developed model policies tying sport to poverty reduction, and disseminated important research. Because Louise also chairs the Commonwealth Games Federation, the Commonwealth Games has also taken on a much more supportive approach to gender equity and sport development. But the Commonwealth has lost much of its earlier prestige, especially in Australia and Canada, which provide significant funding. Neither the Secretariat nor the CGF has abundant resources. Conservative governments in both Australia and Canada stopped funding their very good national programs, although the CGC soldiers on. The United Nations closed its offices for SDP in 2017. It remains a very mixed story, with disappointments alongside heart-warming breakthroughs.



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I have always hoped to bring the lessons of SDP home to Canada, where millions of families and children live in poverty, lack food security, and have little opportunity to participate in sports. There has not been much appetite. Resource-starved schools and municipal recreation agencies struggle to meet the demands of those who are knocking down their doors, so they have little time to identify the needs of those who aren’t there and to work with them to develop appropriate programs. Private entrepreneurs focus on paying customers, while the sports system looks to recruit and develop high-performance athletes. I did get one opportunity to contribute to a Canadian program, through my old bête noire, the Toronto Maple Leafs, now the super-corporation Maple Leaf Sport and Entertainment (MLSE). One day in 2009, president Richard Peddie, whom I knew from our days at the SkyDome, asked me what “I really thought of the Leafs.” Despite its spectacular financial and real estate growth, I replied, “It is widely seen as simply a cash box, athletically and morally bankrupt.” Richard then asked whether I would help him change that, by integrating and giving fresh focus to the various charitable activities of the four MLSE teams (Leafs, Raptors, Marlies, and TFC). I thought about it very seriously, sought the advice of US colleagues who had worked with and/or studied sports teams’ foundations, and agreed to do it. “My goal is not to make the Leafs look good,” I told Richard, “but I will try very hard to improve sporting opportunities for children and youth in Toronto. If it works, it can only enhance the Leafs’ image.” I chaired what became the MLSE Foundation for five years. While everything was done within the media marketing machine that is MLSE, staff were passionate and decisions quickly implemented. Until Richard created the integrated foundation, the various teams distributed small amounts of money to virtually every charity and school that asked, whether it was in sports, the arts, literacy, or social welfare, without any strategic plan or coordination.

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My first task was to phase out donations to everything that was not sports. We did that with generous final payments and moved on. Then we developed a strategic plan focusing on communities in need, with a community development approach. From then on, led by Michael Bartlett, Bridgette Estrela, and Tanya Mruck, staff vetted applications for demonstrated needs-based programming and consultation. For renewals, we developed outcome metrics. In the case of facilities, we inherited an agreement with the City of Toronto to fund renewal. Despite my public sector bias, that was extremely frustrating. The City’s chief criterion was deferred maintenance – there was no interest in prioritizing rinks and basketball courts in neighbourhoods of extreme need. We often found ourselves cutting ribbons in middle-class communities. The City was unbending, so we let the agreement expire. It broke my heart but it was the right thing to do. The Foundation was giving priority to where it was needed most. New revenues enhanced this ambition. The biggest initial source was an agreement between the Ontario government, the Raptors, and the National Basketball Association that gave the Foundation a share of lottery monies. Staff built upon that through the sales of 50–50 tickets, advertising agreements, and special events, almost doubling revenues. By the time I left in 2014, the Foundation was moving away from grant giving, towards operating its own facility and programs. It now operates Launch Pad, a series of sport for development programs in a facility the City abandoned in a challenged inner-city neighbourhood not far from the original Maple Leaf Gardens. It’s a remarkable experiment. With federal and provincial agreements to allow 50–50 purchases on-line, and the Raptors’ recent playoff runs, revenues are soaring, with single-game game receipts surpassing $1 million. I wish public sports and recreation enjoyed such revenues, so that they could provide quality opportunities to every citizen. As it



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has in many areas of public policy, COVID-19 exposed the underfunding and neglect of physical education and community sport and exacerbated the inequality of opportunity. The result has been a sector unable to serve as a significant source of resilience and physical and mental health. A comprehensive strategy of population health would restore and increase such funding. In the meantime, MSLE’s Launch Pad provides a fascinating case study of what sports can do to enhance education, employment, health, and community safety.

24 RUNNER WITH A WORLDVIEW

After he won the Boston Marathon, the Toronto Star editorialized that Tom Longboat “has as much adulation as any mortal man could wish.”1 That was never true for the great Onondaga runner. He faced racist discrimination and condescension throughout his life. But I have always thought that quote was true for me. Since my teenage celebrity as “Canada’s hero,” I’ve received countless honours, and what’s more, a platform to speak freely and mentored opportunities to develop a rewarding career. I feel very privileged to have lived my life in Canadian sports. That experience has taught me that many more people – ­and all of Canadian society – ­would benefit if sports were more widely available, democratic, and humane. Today, Canadian athletes in many sports count among the very best in the world. I swell with pride when our Olympic and Paralympic Teams parade and compete. It’s gratifying that for almost 30 years, our national teams have been composed of an equal number of female and male athletes and are drawn from every region and group in the country. Many athletes, such as Alexandre Bilodeau, Rosie MacLennan, Marnie McBean, Alwyn Morris, Stephanie Nixon, Chantal Petitclerc, Beckie Scott, and Mark Tewksbury, have become eloquent and thoughtful leaders. At the beginning of COVID-19, it was Canadian athletes who first



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pushed the International Olympic Committee to postpone the 2020 Olympics in the interests of public health. Around the world, as former IOC president Juan Antonio ­Samaranch once told me, “everybody knows that Canada puts on exceptional Games.” There’s much to take comfort in. But … there are still too many “buts.” Despite the great value of sports to individuals, families, and entire communities, opportunities are increasingly out of reach for all but the white urban upper classes. Unless we renew efforts to reduce the steep inequality in income and wealth, those difficulties will only increase. Income is only one of the factors that create barriers to participation. In hockey, it’s also been racism and sexism. In women’s sports, it’s homophobia and the fear of gender-based violence. Some of my colleagues in the Canadian sports system still contend that “inspiration is enough,” that if they only get athletes to the podium in international competition, the next generation will be inspired to follow in their footsteps. Sadly, the evidence simply does not support that claim. In fact, as the Canadian medal count improves, overall Canadian participation in sport has declined. Without welcoming, safe, appropriate opportunities, those inspired by our best athletes are condemned to inactivity. While foundations pursuing “corporate social responsibility” subsidize participation, they only do so for a few, barely touching the need. Some of them spend more on advertising their good deeds than they spend on programs. A far more effective solution would be to restore the sport tax on corporations that make money on sports to shore up high-quality physical education and sports in the public schools, planned in accordance with local need, and fund sport for all as part of the national health budget. Another serious challenge is the narrowing of meaning to winning and monetary exchange. Many athletes continue to face physical and psychological abuse meted out in the interest of winning.

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The professional sports and the mass media still present almost exclusively male sports. Why are there no established Canadian professional leagues for women in hockey, basketball, and soccer, let alone leagues where they can make the same salaries as men? Despite their importance, sports are rarely discussed in public policy, in the context of our rich history. There’s still lots to argue for. As I put this memoir to bed in early 2021, it’s hard to know what sport will look like after we all get the COVID-19 vaccine. In other fields, activists strive to make permanent the reforms hurriedly introduced to address the pandemic, and banish forever the worst features of the previous social order. Governments promise to “build back better.” I want the same in sports. More than anything, the pandemic brought home the devastating social and economic costs of inequality in all aspects of society. Over and over again, the poor, racialized, Indigenous, persons with disabilities, and sexual minorities have suffered the highest rates of infection and death, in large part because they were already at greater risk from poverty, inadequate housing, polluted air and water, poor nutrition, abysmal working conditions, and discrimination. Poor children, with inadequate access to the internet, have struggled most with the online instruction that replaced in-person teaching during lockdowns. Women and girls have suffered disproportionately in the cancelled programs and layoffs necessitated by public health. Activists argue for a guaranteed annual income, affordable housing, universal public child care, universal broad-band access, and quality long-term care, after decades of rising inequality and environmental destruction. They call for new controls on corporations, the “Green New Deal,” and an end to tax havens. I believe that, in step with these strategies, we need significant reinvestment in physical education in the public schools and sport for all. It really would not take a lot. During the first days of



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lockdown, it became clear that closing down parks, sports fields, and community centres, as most jurisdictions in Canada initially did, only added to the stress and vulnerability of everyone. The measured reopening of such facilities and the reservation of roadways and parking lots for walking and cycling, with appropriate physical distancing, has helped thousands regain their strength and resilience. The systematic encouragement of physical fitness should be integral to a revitalized investment in population health. We need to insist upon intersectional gender equity and safety in the resumption of sports and physical activity. We need effective monitoring and evaluation, according to the international standards being developed by the United Nations, so that everyone can see how we are doing. We need to remind ourselves that Canada has recognized these opportunities under several international agreements as basic human rights. It is instructive that at the federal level, sport was initially administered by the Department of National Health and Welfare. It’s now part of Canadian Heritage, which is also appropriate, but, in these changed circumstances, perhaps it would make more sense to return it to Health. I would like to see a dedicated portion of the federal and provincial health budgets – s­ ay 1 per cent – devoted ­­ to physical activity and sport for all. When the conditions allow, I would also like to see a full return to spectator sports, especially at the international level. In many countries, COVID-19 has exacerbated the virulent xenophobia of recent years. Renewed Olympic and Paralympic Games should be held to affirm the spirit of humanitarian internationalism and the respect and dignity of all peoples. I’m comfortable in that advocacy because of my own experience. To this day, physical activity and sport continue to reward and keep me healthy. While arthritis makes it difficult to run, I still take daily pleasure in the (currently physically distanced) walks,

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bike rides, and, in the winter, cross-country skiing I do. I learn new things about myself and society every time I’m out. Although I have used treadmills and exercise bikes for recovery from injury, they can’t give me the fulfilment and discoveries of moving through place and time that my outdoor walks, rides, and skiing do. I see the smiles on the faces of the others my age when they tell me about their golf, hockey, and soccer games, and know that it extends their lives. I still get excited when I go to track meets and road races, especially when it’s my wife Phyllis racing in one of the world’s great cities, as she tries to do every year. Sport, like music and food, is one of the great cultures to share with people everywhere. Although I have always favoured participation over spectatorship, I still love watching sports, with their rituals and revelations. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a game where I didn’t experience a “wow” about something, or found someone interesting to talk to. While I share in season’s tickets to the Blue Jays and Raptors in Toronto and rejoice at those teams’ victories, some of my most rewarding experiences in recent years have been at small tournaments completely off the media radar. My favourite these days is the annual Ontario AA men’s baseball championship during the Labour Day weekend at Harvey Jackson Memorial Park in Kendal, Ontario. Check it out! Sports provide some of the greatest joys of contemporary life. It’s important that we bring them to everyone.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Dick Beddoes, “Did Kidd Act Like One?” Globe and Mail, February 5, 1963, 26.

1 A Boy in the Beach 1 Jim Proudfoot, “East Riverdale Is Winner in First Star Peewee Baseball Tourney,” Toronto Star, September 10, 1956, 18.

2 I Become a Runner 1 Russell Elman, “Right or Wrong, J. Roby Kidd Encouraged Bruce in Athletics,” Ottawa Citizen, December 6, 1962, 24. 2 Canadian Press, “Kidd Beats World Mark for Three Miles at London,” Globe and Mail, June 29, 1959, 25. 3 Ibid.

3 Choosing Canada 1 Scott Young, “Why Must They Leave Canada?” Globe and Mail, February 2, 1961, 22. 2 Derm Dunwoody, “Bruce Kidd: He Can Run but Which Way Will He Jump?” Maclean’s, February 25, 1961. 3 Russell Elman, “Right or Wrong, J. Roby Kidd Encouraged Bruce in Athletics,” Ottawa Citizen, December 6, 1962, 24.

4 Canadian Hero 1 Quoted in Joe Perlove, “Kidd Ovation Greatest Ever at Games – Brown,” Toronto Star, January 16, 1961, 9.

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2 Jim Coleman, “By Jim Coleman,” Globe and Mail, January 21, 1961, 23. 3 “Track Whiz: Council Honors Kidd, Mayor Presents Tray,” Globe and Mail, March 28, 1961, 19. 4 “That Undefended Border,” editorial cartoon #1, Globe and Mail, ­February 2, 1956, 6. 5 “A Nation of Weaklings,” Globe and Mail, September 13, 1960, 6. 6 Al Sokol, “Kidd Starts Revolution in American Track Circles,” Toronto Telegram, February 27, 1961. 7 Editorial cartoon # 1, Globe and Mail, August 25, 1961, 6.

5 Commonwealth Champion 1 E.g., Don Towson, “Will Bruce Kidd Burn Himself Out?” Star Weekly, May 6, 1961, 8–11. 2 Russell Elman, “Right or Wrong, J. Roby Kidd Encouraged Bruce in Athletics,” Ottawa Citizen, December 6, 1962, 24. 3 “Tired Kidd Runs Third to Veteran Halberg,” Globe and Mail, June 25, 1962, 18. 4 Neil Allen, “On the Track: Kidd Studies Form at Long Range,” World Sports, October 1962, 53–4. 5 Jack Sullivan, “World Champion Says Kidd Effort Sheer Suicide,” Ottawa Journal, December 6, 1962.

6 A Cheer for Amateurism 1 Cited in Ontario Track Monthly, June 1964, 4, Mihkel Turk Fonds, University of Toronto Archives. 2 Amateur Athletic Union of Canada, “The Athlete’s Handbook. 1971 Pan American Games.” Cited by Bruce Kidd, “The Amateur Code,” Canadian Dimension 8 (November 1971): 14–15. 3 International Amateur Athletics Federation, “Rule 12, Part 3 (v),” The IAAF Handbook (London: IAAF, 1962), 43. See also Bob Pennington, “Suspension Threat to Kidd,” Toronto Telegram, June 12, 1965, 24. 4 Canadian Press, “Kidd Flunks Oratorial Test,” Montreal Star, February 5, 1963; Dick Beddoes, “Did Kidd Act Like One?” Globe and Mail, February 5, 1963, 26.



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7 Great Expectations 1 Milt Dunnell, “A Shot Putter Shoots Up the AAU,” Toronto Star, October 9, 1963, 10. 2 “Letters from Tokyo,” Varsity, October 28, 1964, 2.

8 Lane Three 1 Paul Rimstead, “Wanderlust Will Carry Bruce Kidd to India,” Toronto Star, March 17, 1965, 12.

9 Gap Year 1 Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, Olympics: The India Story (New Delhi: Harper Sport, 2012), 211–43.

10 Recreation for All 1 Shirley Tillotson, The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Post-War Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 2 Bruce Kidd, “The Future of Canadian Amateur Sports,” Canadian Dimension 4 (July–August 1967): 41–2. 3 Report on Amateur Hockey in Canada by the Hockey Study Committee of the National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, January 1967). The King study, “The OHA Junior Hockey Player-Student: An Evaluation,” was published as Appendix C, pp. 69–76. A second report, “Minor-Age Hockey in Canada,” was issued on October 28, 1967, and an undated “Final Report” in 1968.

11 The Olympic Project for Human Rights 1 “Resolution Drafted at Black Youth Conference, Los Angeles, November 23, 1967, Harry Edwards, Chairman,” cited by Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58–9. 2 “Resolution Drafted at Black Youth Conference.” 3 “Trudeau Sets Study Group to Aid Sport,” Globe and Mail, June 4, 1968, 9. 4 Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968. A Report Submitted by Daniel Walker, Director of the Chicago Study Team, to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: E.P. Dutton 1968), xix.

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Notes to pages 169–285 13 Wafflers and Jockrakers

1 Frank Peers, The Politics of Canadian Broadcasting 1920–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 91.

15 Dream Job 1 “Draft Objectives in Physical Education and Athletics at the University of Toronto,” Bruce Kidd Fonds, University of Toronto Archives, September 1973.

16 Critical Support for the Olympics 1 John Macfarlane, “Poor Sport: We Spend Millions on Sport While Our Amateur Athletes Go Begging,” Maclean’s, March 1, 1971. 2 Christie Blatchford, Globe and Mail, July 15, 1976, 46; the script for the final scene was published in Ontario Athletics 1 (December 1976–January 1977). 3 John Fraser, “Not Even a Bronze for Culture at Olympics,” Globe and Mail, July 31, 1976, 25. 4 Jack Mathieson, “Now, Who’s Bruce Trying to Kidd,” Winnipeg Tribune, March 13, 1975. 5 Dick Beddoes, Globe and Mail, June 13, 1975, 30. 6 “Future Games,” Weekend, August 21, 1976, 14.

17 The Boycott That Worked 1 Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 1999), 152, 164. 2 James Laughton, “Athletes Had a Plan if Canada Pulled Out,” Calgary Herald, July 26, 1986, A1.

18 Feminist Ally 1 Department of Athletics and Recreation, University of Toronto, “Task Force on Gender Equity, Report as Approved by Council of the DAR,” April 25, 1974, 7.

19 Recovery Projects 1 “Longboat Not Training Hard,” Toronto Daily Star, January 14, 1909, 12.

20 Struggling for the Olympic Ideals 1 International Olympic Committee, “Leading the Olympic Movement,” https://www.olympic.org/the-ioc/leading-the-olympic-movement, retrieved February 28, 2021.



Notes to pages 297–342

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21 A Sports System We Can Be Proud Of 1 UNESCO, International Charter on Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport, November 17, 2015, 1.1. 2 Richard Gruneau, “Goodbye Gordie Howe: Sport Participation and Class Inequality in the ‘Pay for Play’ Society,” in How Canadians Communicate V: Sports, ed. David Taras and Christopher Waddell (Edmonton: ­Athabasca University Press, 2016), 223–46. 3 Government of Canada, Commission of Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1990), 519.

22 Renewing Varsity 1 E.g., David Grossman, “Good News All Around for Northern Slotback,” Toronto Star, February 9, 1995, E6. 2 John Barber, “Town-Gown Relations Entering Friendly Era,” Globe and Mail, October 16, 1996, A2.

24 Runner with a Worldview 1 “Longboat Wins,” Toronto Daily Star, April 20, 1907, 6.

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INDEX

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 149 Abella, Irving, 268 Abramovitch, Rona, 261 Addario, Susan, 261 African American Patrolman’s League, 149 African National Congress (ANC), 246, 248, 329 African Olympic Committees, 248 African running revolution, 73, 102, 134 Ali, Muhammad, 149 Alinsky, Saul, 146 Allan, Maurice, 286 Allen, Neil, 72–3 Allen, William, 60 All-India Council of Sport, 124–5 amateur athletic unions (AAUs), 35, 37, 42–3, 53, 57, 82–4, 92, 161, 274, 276, 279 amateur sport, 77–88, 132–3 Anderson, Ian, 210 Anderson, John, fig. 8 apartheid, 72, 102, 228 anti-apartheid movement in sports, 136, 148, 228, 231–50, 287, 329– 30, fig. 19

anti-Semitism in sports, 19 Anyaoku, Emeka, 330 Arcand, Eugene, fig. 26 Arctic Winter Games (Yellowknife, 1970), 162 Armstrong, Christopher, 268, 279 Around the Bay (Hamilton), 42, 66 Artists Athletes Coalition, 217–18, fig. 18 Asian Games: Delhi, 1982, 126 Aso, Take, 128 L’Association Athlétique d’Amateurs de National, 279 Athlete Assistance Program (Sport Canada), 227, 320 athletes’ activism and rights, 83, 150–1, 182–3, 198, 212, 225–6, 270–2, 274–5, 278, 295, 298, 306, 333, 342 AthletesCAN, 264, 287, 304, 331 The Athletes’ Show (play), 220–1, fig. 18 Athletics Canada, 35, 302 athletic scholarships, 47–8, 318–22 Atkins, Orville, 41, 46, fig. 3 Atwood, Margaret, 171 Auden, W.H., 1, 60

354 Index authoritarianism in sports, 78, 174 Ayot, Pierre, 219 Bailey, Dave, 40–1, 79, 136–7 Baillie, Bill, 95 Ballard, Harold, 85 Ballinger, Lee, 182 Bannister, Roger, 26, 236 Barber, Sara, 72 Barnes, Laverne, 173 Bartlett, Michael, 340 Bassett, John, 85 Batty, Mel, 76 Bauer, David, 138, 140, 175 Baun, Bob, 77 Baxter, Betty, 254 Bayi, Filbert, 228, 236 Bazin, Jean, 109 the Beach (Toronto), 11–24 Beaches-Woodbine riding, 166, 169, 171, 176–7 Beamish, Rob, 184, 286, 299, 302 Beatty, Jim, 53, 90–1, 95 Beddoes, Dick, 3, 87, 182, 226 Beers, George, 81 Beliveau, Jean, 152 Bell, Marilyn, 19, 84 Bell, Max, 138 Bellamy, Carol, 336 Bennett, Peter, 14 Bennett, W.A.C., 97 Benson, Clara, 204 Berck, Phyllis, 245, 249, 254–5, 288–9, 292, 307, 346, fig. 22, fig. 32 Best, Alf, 23, 35 Best, Pauline, 23 “Best Ever” funding programme, 284

Bigras, Sylvie, fig. 31 Bilodeau, Alexandre, 342 Bird, Florence, 187 Birgeneau, Robert, 325–6 Black Lives Matter, 242 Blainey, David, 259 Blainey, Justine, 259 Blatchford, Christie, 220 Blissett, Bill, 200 Bolotnikov, Pyotr, 100 Bolt, Usain, 326 Bordia, Anil, 123 Bordia, Otima, 123 Boreskie, Sue, 286 Boston, Ralph, 54 Boston Athletic Association meet (1962), 65 Boston Marathon (1907), 276, 278, 342 Bouton, Jim, 173 Box, Ab, 14 boycotts in sports, 231–50, 269, 272, 281–2, 284 Boyle, John, 171, 220 Brannan, Carl, 155–6, 164, 202 Brant, Rick, fig. 26 Brasher, Chris, 80 “Bread and Roses,” 292 “Bread Not Circuses” (BNC), 291–2 Brewer, Carl, 77, 139 British Commonwealth Games: Christchurch, 1974, 236 British Empire and Commonwealth Games (BECG): Cardiff, 1958, 74; Kingston, Jamaica, 1966, 124,  133–4, fig. 16; Perth, 1962, 64–5, 70–6, 233, 253, fig. 6–8



Index 355

British Empire Games: Hamilton, 1930, 64, 134; Vancouver, 1954, 26, 64, 236 Broadbent, Ed, 163 Broadfoot, Dave, 140 Brock, Sir Isaac, 56 Brower, Ruth, 268 Brown, Hal, 32, 46 Brown, John, 18 Brown, Megan, fig. 28 Brown, Walter, 52 Browne, Lynne, 170 Brumel, Valeriy, 54 Brundage, Avery, 101, 150, 212, 221 Brutus, Dennis, 232, 236 Bryden, Ken, 169 Bryden, Marion, 169–70 Buchbinder, Howard, 178 Buitenhuis, Peter, 48 Bullivant, Mike, 95 Bunting, James, 266 Burka, Petra, 187, 254 Burns, Tommy, 220 Burstyn, Varda, 3, 142–4, 146, 154, 164, 166, 170, 172, 177, 254 Bush, George W., 336 Bush, Jim, 48 Bustamante, Alexander, 28 California Relays: Modesto, CA 1962, 67 Campagnolo, Iona, 244 Campbell, Robin, 314–15, 327 Campbell, Sue, 337–8 Canada Council for the Arts, 22, 34–5, 159, 218–19 Canada Games Flag, 161 Canada Winter Games (1967), 110–11

Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine, 160 Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA), 138–40, 159, 175 Canadian Artists’ Representation, 216 Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport (CAAWS; now Canadian Women and Sport), 254–5, 259, 263–4, 307 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 2, 15, 22, 25, 26, 57, 64, 89, 167, 168, 169, 225, 227, 251, 280, 281, 299 Canadian Canoe Museum, 193 Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports (CCES), 264–5, 304 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), 6, 259, 261 Canadian Conference of the Arts, 218 Canadian Football League (CFL), 168, 175 Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU; after 1978, Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union), 109, 111–12, 135–7, 319–21 Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union cross-country championship (1963), 92–3 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), 331 Canadian Jewish Congress, 272 Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education, 176, 184

356 Index Canadian Marathon Championships: Waterloo, 1974, fig. 17 Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), 60; Labour Day meet, 1963, 91; Labour Day meet, 1964, 96 Canadian nationalism, 34, 55–6, 61, 169 Canadian Olympic Committee (COC; at times as the Canadian Olympic Association [COA]), 109, 133, 226, 242, 270, 282, 285–7, 290 Canadian Olympic Team, 1964, 97; 1976, 224–5 Canadian Olympic Trials: Saskatoon 1960, 44–5; Montreal 1964, 95 Canadian Open Golf Championship: Glen Abbey, 1987, 245 Canadian Sport Council (CSC), 304 Canadian Sport Policy, 297, 306–7 Canadian Sports Awards, 160 Canadian Sports Institute Ontario, 294 Canadian Sports Leadership Corps, 332 Canadian Student Loan Program (1964), 109 Canadian Union of Students (CUS), 108–9, 111, 127, 134–7 Canadian Union of Student Sports (CUSS), 111–12 Canadian University Press, 94, 98, 100 Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), 96, 108, 124, 233, 331

Canadian Women and Sport. See Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport Canham, Don, 48 Cantelon, Hart, 184, 281 Cardwell, Gord, 27 Carius, Al, 147 Carlos, John, 150–1, 182, 212 Carmichael, Dick, 37 Carson, Paul, 317 Carter, Jimmy, 242–3, 281 Cass, Fred, 156–7 Castro, Fidel, 49 Centennial College, 132, 142, 188 CFRB (radio station), 15, 67, 84–5 Chand, Dutee, 265–6, fig. 21 Charest, Bertrand, 264 Charest, Jean, 245, 301 “Chicago Police Riot,” 153–4 Chintu, Chifumbe, 334 Chituwo, Brian, 334 Cieman, Henry, 270 Circus ’76, 218 Citizen of the Year award (Toronto Telegram), 85–6 Clark, Joe, 245, 298 Clarke, Ron, 75, 94–6, 100–2, 134, fig. 8 Clarkson, Adrienne, fig. 32 Clarkson, Stephen, 178 Clement, Doug, 301 Clohessy, Pat, 69, 75, fig. 8 Coaching Association of Canada, 60 Coakley, Jay, 336 Coderre, Denis, 305 Colby, Harold, 35 Coleman, Jim, 55 Coleman, Layne, 219



Index 357

Comaneci, Nadia, 227 Combines Investigation Act (1923), 140 Committee on Government Productivity, 164 Committee on Youth, 163 Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport (CABOS), 266, 337 Commonwealth Committee for Cooperation in Sport, 330 Commonwealth Games, 330; Delhi, 2010, 127; Edinburgh, 1986, 243–4; Edmonton, 1978, 238, 240–2, 244, 284; Glasgow, 2014, 266; Melbourne, 2006, 73 Commonwealth Games Association of Canada, 243 Commonwealth Games Canada (CGC), 328, 331, 335 Commonwealth Games Federation, 242, 249, 338 Commonwealth Secretariat, 337–8 Commonwealth Sport Development Program (CSDP), 331 community college system, 132, 156, 188 Community Programs Branch (Ontario Department of Education), 106, 127, 129, 131–2, 137, 141, 154 Compton Relays: Los Angeles, 1962, 67–8 Conick, Cy, 156, 164, 183 Conway, Jill Ker, 202–3, 205–6, 209 Cook, Myrtle, 275 Cook, Ramsay, 268 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 23, 169 Corbett, E.A. “Ned,” 22

Corbett, John, 138 Cosell, Howard, 182 Coubertin, Pierre de, 79, 98–100, 117, 184–5, 222, 237, 285, 289–90, 303 Coulter, Clare, 219 counter-Olympics: Beijing, 1980, 249 Courtney, Tom, 50 Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), 266 COVID-19 pandemic, 6, 297, 322, 341–2, 344–5 Cranston, Toller, 213 Crichton, Kelly, 171, 177 Critelli, Chris, 286 Crombie, David, 179, 292–3 Crook, Maxine, 281 Cross, Lance, 237 Crothers, Bill, 2, 41, 43, 45, 50, 53, 57, 67, 70, 72, 76, 78, 89, 91, 95, 97, 116, 137–8, fig. 3, fig. 4, fig. 7, fig. 28; Bill Crothers Secondary School, 78–9; California relays, 67; Perth BECG, 1962, 70; Sugar Bowl Track Meet, 76; Tokyo Olympics 1964, 97; World Student Games, 116–17 Crow, Norton, 81, 110 Crysdale, Joe, 15 Cuban missile crisis, 71 Curnoe, Greg, 171, 216 Currie Hall, Cara, fig. 26 Dalai Lama, 124 Dales, John, 169 Daley, Richard J., 153 Daly, Jim, 98 Daly, Mr. (school coach), 18

358 Index Daniel, Juri, 15, 191–2, 197–8, 202, 207 Darnell, Simon, 336 Davidson, George, 106 Davis, Bill, 132, 141, 166, 176–7 Dawes, Eva, 270, 272 Delaney, Ron, 63 Dellandrea, Jon, 315 de Meena, Darcy, 121 Demers, Guylaine, 254, 263, 308 Demos, Rafael, 49 Department of Athletics and Recreation (DAR, U of T), 260–1, 309, 312–17, 323 Department of National Health and Welfare, 160 de Pédery-Hunt, Dora, 217 Despres, Leon, 144 Des Ruisseaux, Paul, 153 DeVilliers, Paul, 305, 308 Devitt, John, 64 Devlin, Terry, 282 Dewey, John, 144 Dickson, Gord, 37, 45, 76 Diefenbaker, John, 23, 49, 56, 61–2, 72, 85 Dimond, Jack, 202, 207 Dobie, Pat, 30 D’Oliveira, Basil, 232 Donnelly, Peter, 81, 257, 307, 316, 336, fig. 23 doping in sports, 288, 300–5 Dotson, Bill, 70 Douglas, Don, 60 Douglas, Tommy, 169 Downey, Allan: The Creator’s Game, 279 Downs, Vince, 18–19

Drakich, Kristine, 317 Drapeau, Jean, 160, 211–12, 214–15, 220, 223, 230 Drayton, Jerome, 224, 227–8 Drury, E.C., 130 Dryden, Ken, 318 Dubin, Charles, 301–4, 308 Dubin Commission Report, 302, 304, 308 Duckworth, Martin, 25 Dudfield, Oliver, 338 Duerkop, Diana, 286 Duff, Dick, 139 Dunlap, Frank, 138 Dunnell, Milt, 89, 278 Dupré, J. Stefan “Steve,” 104, 154, 169, 172 Dussault, Clarence “Ding,” 51 Dyon, Mike, 200 Eagleson, Alan, 77 Eales, Geoff, 45 East Riverdale pee wee baseball, 17–19, 38, fig. 2 East York Track Club (EYTC), 2, 29–30, 32, 36, 40–3, 55, 78, 133, 199, 252, fig. 3 Easto, Dora (aunt), 252 Ebbs, Harry, 191, 198 Eberts, Mary, 198, 259 Edmonton Grads, 275 Edwards, Harry, 147–9, 151, 173, 175, 182–3 Effros, Sid, 281–2 Elias, Norbert, 184–5 Elizabeth II, 133–4 Elliott, Herb, 64 Emery, Bryan, 31, 51, 137, fig. 3



Index 359

Endicott, Gilles, 170 English championships: London, 1962, 69 Espaces verts, 214 Estrela, Bridgette, 340 Evans, John, 202 Evans, Lee, 147–9 Evans, Russ, 31–2 Faculty of Physical Education and Health (U of T), 309 Faloney, Bernie, 63 Farmer-Labour Government of Ontario, 130 The Farm Show (play), 219 Federal-Provincial-Territorial (FPT) Work Group on Girls and Women in Sport (2018), 252, 308 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA): World Cup 2026, 294 Fédération Internationale du Sport Universitaire (FISU), 108–9, 111, 116, 127; Summer Games (Moscow, 1973), 137; Winter Games (Innsbruck, 1968), 137; Winter Games (Turin, 1966), 135–6 la Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI), 274 feminism, 172, 179, 183, 185, 187, 253, 256, 274 Ferguson, Rich, 26, 70 Findlay, Steve, 200 Finlayson, Michael, 200, 323–4 Finnish Workers’ Sports Federation (TUL), 271–2

Firestone 15: Hamilton, 1962, 66; Hamilton, 1963, 91 Fisher, Douglas, 159 Fisher, Gordon, 207 Fitness and Amateur Sport (FAS), 105–6, 110–11, 130, 132, 136–7, 161; Act (1961), 61, 71, 305 Fitzgerald, Miss (teacher), 13 Fleck, Jim, 164 Flynn, John, 18 Foot, Fred, 40–3, 46, 48, 50–3, 55, 66, 70, 79, 81, 83, 85, 96, 133, 163, 181, fig. 3, fig. 14; agrees to Bruce’s first marathon, 75–6; agrees to coach Bruce, 29–32; four-minute mile challenge, 137; “master organizer and coach,” 35–7; “master psychologist,” 45; retirement, 199; Tokyo Olympics 1964, 89 Foreman, Joe, 30 Forrest, Ivan, 255 Fowler, Roy, 70 Fox, David, 219–20 Francis, Charlie, 301–2 Francis, Mr. (coach in India), 125 Francks, Don, 60 Franco, Francisco, 272 Fraser, Dawn, 64 Fraser, John, 220–1 Friel, Jack, 200, 278 Friends of Football (U of T), 313–14 Frost, Robert, 105 Frum, Barbara, 225 Fujiwara, David, 278 Fulford, Robert, 14 Fulwell, Roz, 200, 278

360 Index Games of the Emerging Forces: Jakarta, 1963, 102, 249 The Games of Winter (play), 221 Gammoudi, Mohammed, 101–2 Gandhi, Indira, 122, 126 Gandhi, Mahatma, 124 Ganga, Jean-Claude, 236–8, 240, 247 gender-based violence (GBV), 263–4, 304 gender bias: in education, 132; in sports, 20, 174–5, 202–4, 249, 258, 261, 285 gender equity, 261–3, 292, 304, 307, 321, 328, 338, 342, 345; in sports, fig. 20 Gender Equity Task Force (U of T), 261–2 Geoffrion, Bernie, 63 Georgevski, Carl, 317 Gerace, Diane, 97 Gertler, Meric, 2 Gibb, Alexandrine, 81, 256, 275 Gibson, Corey, 278 Gibson, Tom, 217 Giguere, Kathleen, 286 Gilbert, Doug, 45, 84, 142, 184, 213–14, fig. 3 Gillmore, Red, 23 Givens, Phillip, 88 Gladish, Bob, 255 Gladstone Athletic Club, 29 Gladwell, Malcolm, 43–4 Glassford, Gerry, 185 Gleneagles Agreement, 241, 243–4 Gobeil, Suzanne, 59 Godfrey, John, 92 Godfrey, Paul, 209 Goel, Vivek, 327

Goldbloom, Victor, 215, 227 Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport (U of T), 327 Gonick, Cy, 164, 183 Goodman, Jack, 317 Gould, Glenn, 14 Gowan, Geoff, 331 Grabb, John, 27, 29 Graduate Program in Exercise Sciences (U of T), 309, 317 Granatstein, Jack, 268 Gray, John, 220 Green, Janet-Laine, 219 Greene, Nancy, 153, 213 Gregory, Dick, 144, 148 Griner, David, 116 Grossman, David, 319 Groves, Anne, 124, 128 Gruneau, Danielle, fig. 25 Gruneau, Rick, 183–4, 300, fig. 25 Gruneau, Shelley, fig. 25 Gullickson, Chuck, 188–9 Gurney, Helen, 254 Gutknecht, John, 63, 69 Halberg, Murray, 26, 46, 52, 64–5, 67–9, 73–5, 81, 87–8, 91, 100, fig. 8 Halberg Disability Sport Foundation, 88 Hall, Ann, 254, 257–8 Hall, Barbara, 292 Hall, Stuart, 183 Halt All Racist Tours (HART), 238 Hampton, Fred, 154 Handelman, Frank, 147 Hanna, Louise, 213 Harding, Dick, 30

Harris, Harold, 148 Harris, Mike, 230 Hart House (U of T), 33–4, 203–4 Harvard University, 48–50 Hary, Armin, 46 Hashemi, Goli, 336 Hay, Linda, 171 Haydon, A. Eustace, 146 Haydon, Ted, 142, 146–7 Hayes, Bob, 67 Helsinki Marathon, 271 Henderson, Paul, 291–2 Henry, Franklin, 190 Heron, Craig, 268 Herrndorf, Peter, 325 Hewett, Anne, 257 Hewitt, Foster, 15 Hewitt, W.A., 81 Higdon, Hal, 223 Higgins, Andy, 32, 199, 301 Hill, Brad, 7, 79 Hillmer, Anne, 329–30 Hiroshima, 99, 103 Hitler, Adolf, 62, 269 HIV and AIDS epidemic, 328, 332–3 Hoch, Paul, 173, 175 hockey: racism and sexism, 343; violence, 330 Hockey Canada, 159–60, 174–5 Hockey Study Committee, 159 Hoffman, Abby, 2, 79, 90, 99, 116, 135, 183, 187, 209, 213, 217, 224, 226, 234, 243, 253–4; antiapartheid activism, 234; Artists Athletes Coalition, 217–18; civil service career, 79; feminist policies in Canadian sports, 183, 187; Perth British Empire

Index 361 and Commonwealth Games, 1962, 90; Sport Canada, 283–4; support for athletes, 224, 226–7; support for Olympics, 213; support for women in sports, 253–5, 259; World Student Games, 116, 136 Hoffman, Liz, 254, 317, 321, 325–6 Hornung, Paul, 87 Houston, Susan, 268 Howard, Tom, 228 Huey, Linda, 282 Huhn, Klaus, 222–3 Hull, Bobby, 189 Human Rights Watch, 265 Hunnius, Gerry, 178 Hurtubise, Jacques, 219 Hutcheson, John 171 Hutchins, Robert, 144 Hyman, Martin, 70, 80 Iacobucci, Frank, 326 Iacovetta, Franca, 268 Ibbotson, Derek, 70, 75, fig. 8 Igloi, Mihaly “Mike,” 33, 66, 90 Imlach, George “Punch,” 78 Indian Olympic Association, 125 Indigenous games, fig. 26 Indigenous people, 21, 171, 185, 193, 217, 276–9, 311, 342, fig. 12 Indigenous Rights Resistance, 242 Innis, Harold, 183 Institute for the Study of Sport and Society (U California, Berkeley), 173 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF; now World Athletics), 116, 265–6, fig. 21

362 Index “The International Campaign against Apartheid Sport,” 238–9 International Committee for the Sociology of Sport, 176 “International Development through Sport,” 328 “International Inspiration,” 333 International Olympic Academy, fig. 27 International Olympic Committee (IOC), 211, 236–7, 287–8, 294; abolishes amateurism, 84; awards 1976 Olympics to Montreal, 160, 211; compared to Workers’ Olympics, 273; criticized by Justice Dubin, 303; human rights issues, 295–6; pressure to end boycott of South Africa, 246, 248; refuses to cancel Moscow Games 1980, 242; refuses to condemn New Zealand rugby tour, 228–9; social movement, 284–5; suspends and expels SANOC, 233 International Student Conference (ISC), 108 International Union of Students (IUS), 108 International Workers and Amateurs in Sport Federation (CSIT), 273 International Working Group on Sport for Development, 336–7 Irons, Jim, 45, fig. 3 Isaacs, Av, 218 Jackman, Harry, 48 Jackson, Jesse, 145 Jackson, Roger, 213, 285, 287, 290

Jacobs, Ira, 327 Jaffary, Karl, 209 Jelinek, Otto, 284 Jerome, Harry, 2, 46, 67, 72, 74, 97, 116, 135, 148, 150, 213, fig. 13 jockrakers, 173–5 Johnson, Ben, 300–2 Johnson, Lyndon, 145 Johnson, Rafer, 149 Jones, Diane, 220 Jordon, Payton, 48 Juantorena, Alberto, 228 Juckes, Gordon, 139 Justice, Charlie, 16 Kakuwa, Musheke, 333–4 Kalirani, Lazarous, 334 Kang, Shin Pyo, 289 Karkazis, Katrina, 266 Kater, Michael, 268 Kazinkina, Tatanya, 228 Keino, Kipchoge “Kip,” 73, 134 Keith, Bill, 200 Kennedy, John F., 50, 71, 92–3 Kennedy family, 48 Kent, Judy, 254, 331, fig. 31 Kerr, George, 54 Kerr, Gretchen, 263, 311, 317 Kerr, J. Leslie, 58–9 Kerrison, Harry, 233 Khan, Chuttan, 123 Khrushchev, Nikita, 71 “Kicking AIDS Out,” 332 Kidd, Alice (sister), 12 Kidd, Andrew, 21 Kidd, Bruce —books: Athletes’ Rights in Canada, 198, 259; The Death of Hockey, 174–5; The Political Economy of

Sport, 186; Tom Longboat, 277, fig. 12 —careers: civil service, 154–6, 164–5; journalism, 67, 71, 83–4, 94, 98, 100, 133, 152, 158, 229; sports research, 137–41, 198, 306, 316, fig. 12; teaching, 96, 119–21, 172–3, 183, 188, 192–4, 197–210, 268; university administration, 258, 260–1, 294, 299, 309–27, fig. 30; university athletics organization, 202–8; university politics, 201–2, 313; writing, 163–4, 172, 174, 183, 205–6, 276, 283 —education: graduate studies in continuing education, 141–2, 145; graduate studies in history, 268, 279; high school, 14, 27, 58, fig. 5; public school, 13, 20; undergraduate studies in political economy, 62–3, 104–10 —honours and awards: 2, 43, 63, 76, 83, 85–6, 91, 342, fig. 11, fig. 12, fig. 32 —images: fig. 2–32 —injuries: 65, 90–1, 95–6, 99, 104, 147, 228, 346 —interests: adult education, 21, 106, 122–3, 127, 129–32, 172; anti-apartheid movement in sports, 234–46; arts and culture, 216–21, fig. 18; athletic scholarships, 321; baseball, 17–18, 25, fig. 2; Canadian nationalism, 97, 162, 169; civil rights in sports, 157; doping in sports, 301–4; foreign aid, 107; gender equity in

Index 363 sports, 251–66, 285, 292, 307; humanitarian internationalism, 97, 100; human rights activism, 153, 295–6; Indian sports, 126–7; music, art, drama, 20; nuclear disarmament, 80, 103; Olympic internationalism, 169, 213, 289–90; Olympic sports education, 286–7; philanthropy, 86; physical activity and sport for all, 344–5; physical education in schools, 190, 197, 344; political economy of sports, 104–6, 127, 129, 163–4, 176, 181–94, 335; politics, 23, 49, 72, 92, 102–3, 165–80, 222; public policy, 96; public speaking, 60–1, 86–8, 183, 238, 274; reading, 24; sports advocacy and activism, 3–5, 60–1, 157–8, 175, 186–7, 209–10, 278, 281–2, 298–300, 336, fig. 31, fig. 32; sports for development and peace, 328–41; sports history, 184–5, 267–76, 278–9; sports observer and organizer, 101, 108–9, 111–12, 127, 152, 290–4; sports policy, 161–3, 305–7, 337; sports sociology, 112, fig. 25; sports studies, 4–5, 101, 108–9, 175–6, 184–6, 316; travel, 102, 107–8, 112, 115–19, 124, 128, fig. 15, fig. 23 —running highlights: BECG, Kingston, Jamaica, 1966, 134, fig. 16; Canadian Marathon Championships, Waterloo 1974, fig. 17; first marathon, BECG, Perth, 1962, 64–5, 70–6, fig. 6–8; Knights of Columbus Indoor

364 Index Kidd, Bruce (cont’d) Meet, Boston, 1961, 49–57, fig. 4; last marathon, Helsinki, 1982, 271; Olympics, Tokyo, Summer 1964, 97–101; senior high school mile record, 37; Toronto Police Games, 1961, fig. 9; 1962 mile, 70; US indoor three-mile championship, 53; Kidd, David (brother), 7, 12, 112, 115, 119, 123, 128, 291, fig. 15 Kidd, Dorothy (sister), 17, 119, 254 Kidd, John (uncle), 63, 65 Kidd, Margaret (mother), 11–12, 14–15, 16–7, 39, 58-59, 62, 83, 188, 252, 323, 131, fig. 1; advice, 328; author of children’s books, 123; child care specialist, 11; “experiential education,” 28; graduate degree, 188, 252; ideals of sport, 18; India, 112, 119; nutrition-conscious, 117; parents, 21; politics, 20; social democratic ideas, 22; sports player, 15; support for Bruce’s running, 58; university, 46, 103 Kidd, Roby (James Robbins) (father), 14, 21–2, 131, fig. 1; adult education, 27–9; adult education in India, 106, 112, 119, 122; CBC Olympic television crew, 25–6, 212; doctorate in adult education, 11; golf, 13; ideals of sport, 18; interest in the arts, 20; skiing, 15; SSHRC, 63; support for Bruce, 31, 50, 72; university, 46 Kidd, Ross (brother), 7, 11, 13, 20, 27, 43, 93, 96, 233–4, 238, fig. 1 Kilby, Brian, 76, 134, fig. 16

kinesiology, 190, 299, 310 King, Alan, 139 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 145–6 Kirby, Sandi, 263 Knight, Justyn, 69 Knights of Columbus Indoor Meet: Boston, 1961, 49, 51–2, 55–7, fig. 4; Boston, 1962, 65; Cleveland, 1962, 65 Kollins, Rick, 112 Komagata Maru, 189 Korobkov, Gavriil, 99 Koutroumpis, Peter, 313 Kramer, Burton, 219 Kuts, Vladimir, 32, 40, 68, 75, 220 Kyle, Doug, 45, 66–7, 69–70 Labelle, Pierre, 286 Ladouceur, Paul, 111 Lagrange, Leo, 275 Lahaie, Gerry, 111 Lalonde, Marc, 225, 234 Lamarsh, Judy, 110 Lancashire, Ann, 200 Landsberg, Michele, 177 Landy, John, 26, 29, 236, fig. 24 Lang, Chris, 159 Langille, Howard, 15 Lapchick, Richard, 238 Larkin, June, 336 Larrieu, Ron, 93, 95, 99 Laskin, John, 107 Laughren, Floyd, 298 Launch Pad, 340–1 Lawrence, Allan “Al,” 53, 73 Laxer, James “Jim,” 92, 157, 171, 177, 182 Lay, Marion, 183, 187, 217, 254, 259, fig. 20

Layton, Irving, 217 Layton, Jack, 292 Leclair, Jill, 254 Le Corbusier, 126 Lee, Dennis, 171 Lefaive, Lou, 160, 162 Legacy and Community Enhancement Committee, 293 Leiper, Jean, 285 Leishman, Tim, 127 Lenskyj, Helen, 254 Leps, Ergas, 37, 45, 135 Lesage, Jean, 108 Leslie Street Spit, 288–9 Letheren, Carol Anne, 289–90 Levenson, Stan, 30 Lévesque, René, 85, 169 Levitt, Kari, 168 Lewis, Carl, 300 Lewis, David, 171, 181 Lewis, Karen, 317 Lewis, Stephen, 171, 177–8 L’Heureux, Bill, 138, 140–1 Lightfoot, Gordon, 142, 171 Lindgren, Gerry, 94–5 Lindstrom, Varpu, 268 Lionel Conacher (Canadian Press) Male Athlete of the Year Award, 2, 63, 76 Littleton, Jim, 171 Lochhead, Kenneth, 219 Longboat, Tom, 91, 220, 276–8, 342 Longboat, Tom Jr., 278 Longboat Road Runners, 278 Lonsbrough, Anita, 64 Lord, Margaret, 35, 81, 274 Lou Marsh Trophy (Canada’s Athlete of the Year), 63, fig. 11

Index 365 Lucy (artist), 219 Luftspring, Sam, 272 Lumsden, Ian, 163 Lydiard, Arthur, 99 MacAloon, John, 101, 227–8, 289 Macdonald, H.I., 79–80 Macdonald, John, 111 MacDonnell, Maggie, 336 Macfarlane, John, 94, 174–5 MacGregor, Don, 19 Machek, Dominik, 200 MacIntosh, Donald, 184 Mackenzie, Robin, 219 Mackenzie King, William Lyon, 106 MacLennan, Rosie, 342 Macmillan, Margaret, 326 MacNaughton, Charles, 166 Macy, John, 53, 63 Madsen, Betty, 15 Madsen, John, 15 Maeots, Krista, 171, 177 Maharajah’s College, 119, 123 Mahovlich, Frank, 87 Major League Baseball, 272 Majumdar, Boria, 127 “Make Poverty History,” 333 Makosky, Lyle, 286, 301 Malcolmson, Kim, 171 Malvern Collegiate, 46, 58 Mandela, Nelson, 233, 246, 248, 329 Mandell, Richard: The Nazi Olympics, 269 Manley, Michael, 241 Manley, Norman, 28 Maple Leaf Gardens, 16, 85, 89, 95, 340

366 Index Maple Leaf Sport and Entertainment (MLSE), 315, 339; MLSE Foundation, 339–41 Marcotte, Gaston, 138 Martin, Louise, 338 Massey, Vincent, 34 Mathare Youth Sports Association, 329 Mathieson, Jack, 226 May, Elaine, 144 McAllister, Ron, 84, 86 McArdle, Peter, 52, 63, 67, 69, 93–4, 99 McBean, Marnie, 342 McCarthy, Eugene, 153 McCauley, Bev, 142 McCulley, Joseph “Joe,” 80, 92 McCurdy, Bill, 50 McDermott, Dennis, 177 McEwan, Jean, 219 McFarlane, Bruce, 152 McGovern, George, 153 McGregor, Ian, 312 McInnis, Irene Moore, 256 McIntyre, Joann, 219 McKnight, Wes, 15 McLeod, Dan, 135 McLeod, Jack, 200 McLuhan, Marshall, 183 McMurtry, Roy, 329–30 McRuer, J.C., 156–7 Meagher, Aileen, 270 Meagher, John, 138 Medhurst, Dorothy, 253 Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), 146, 153–4 Medicare, 156 Meggyssey, David, 173–4 Mehta, Mohan Singh, 122

Mehta, Nalin, 127 Melia, Paul, 265–6 Merrick, James, 81 Merriman, John, 74, 76 Metcalfe, Alan, 176, 183–4 #MeToo, 264 Metro Track and Field Centre, 210 Michaels, Lorne, 2, 164–5 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 333 Milliat, Alice, 274 Mills, Billy, 93–4, 99–102, fig. 26 Miracle Mile (1954), 70, fig. 24 Mitchell, Joni, 171 Mitra, Payoshni, 266, fig. 21 Mobile Intensive Learning Experience (MILE), 188 Molinari, Guido, 219 Montour, Frank, 276 Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, 292 Moola, Fiona, 336 Moore, Mavor, 164, 169, 217 Morley, Brad, 200 Morris, Alwyn, 342, fig. 26 Moses, Edwin, 227 Mount San Antonio Relays: Walnut, CA, 1961, 57 Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada (MISC), 178–9 Mruck, Tanya, 340 Muldoon, Robert, 235, 241 Mulroney, Brian, 244 Munro, John, 153, 160 Munro, Paul, fig. 3 Munroe, Marion, 30, 44, fig. 3 Murchison, Ira, 322 Mwanawasa, Levy, 334–5 Mwape, Joyce, 234



Index 367

Nasser, Larry, 264 National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport, 133, 191; Hockey Study Committee, 137–41 National Coaching Certification Program, 141 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA, USA), 144, 146, 319–20 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 153 National Conference on Women in Sport: Toronto, 1974, 252, 254 National Energy Policy, 283 National Film Board (NFB), 2, 59 National Football League (NFL) Players’ Association, 174 National Hockey League (NHL): 77, 138–40, 159, 168, 174, 175, 181, 272, 279, 280, 299 National Institute of Sports (NIS, India), 124–5 National Men’s Hockey Team, 140 National Olympic Committee for South Africa (NOCSA), 248–9 National Physical Fitness Act (NPFA, 1943), 106, 130 National Sport and Recreation Centre, 160–1 national sports organizations (NSOs), 160–1 National Steelcar War Veterans’ Association road race (1963), 91, fig. 12 Nebiolo, Primo, 116 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 122, 125 Nelles, Viv, 268

New Democratic Party (NDP), 165, 169–70, 176, 179, 181 Newlove, John, 217 New York City, 11–12, 53, fig. 14 Nichols, Mike, 144 Nixon, Richard, 167, 216 Nixon, Stephanie, 342 Njelesani, Donald, 334, 336 Njelesani, Evarist, 334 Norman, Mark, 257 Norman, Peter, 150 Norris, Fred, 52, 66–7 North American Indigenous Games, fig. 26 North American Society of Sport History, 176 Nurmi, Paavo, 26, 271 Nurse, Roy, 14 Oakley, Alex, 97, 220 O’Bryan, Maureen, 233 Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO, USA), 145 O’Hara, Tom, 76 Olympiad for the Disabled (now Paralympics), 235 Olympic Academy of Canada, 243, 285–90 Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), 147, 150–1, 182 Olympics: ancient Greece, 184; Atlanta, Summer 1996, 248, 292, 305; Barcelona, Summer 1992, 247–8, fig. 19; Beijing, Summer 2008, 230, 293; Beijing, Winter 2022, 296; Berlin, Summer 1936, 62, 150, 222, 269–70, 273, 275; Calgary, Winter 1988, 221, 230, 283–4, fig. 22; Cortina

368 Index Olympics (cont’d) d’Ampezzo, Winter 1956, 56; Helsinki, Summer 1952, 25–6, 75, 212, 271; Innsbruck, Winter 1964, 138; Innsbruck, Winter 1976, 160; Lake Placid, Winter 1932, 128; Lake Placid, Winter 1980, 281; London, Summer 1908, 69, 276–7; London, Summer 1948, 217; London, Summer 2012, 333; Los Angeles, Summer 1932, 227, 270, 273; Los Angeles, Summer 1984, 282, 291; Los Angeles, Summer 2028, 294; Melbourne, Summer 1956, 32, 282; Mexico City, Summer 1968, 147–9, 212; modern, 184–5; Montreal, Summer 1976, 62, 137, 160, 192, 206, 211–16, 220–30, 235–8, 269, 284, 305, fig. 18; Moscow, Summer 1980, 242–3, 250, 281–2, 284; Munich, Summer 1972, 212, 216; PyeongChang, Winter 2018, 111, 258; Rio de Janeiro, Summer 2016, 258, 266, 295; Rome, Summer 1960, 46, 56, 65; Seoul, Summer 1988, 289–90, 300–2; Sydney, Summer 2000, 305; Tokyo, Summer 1964, 89, 97–8, 100–1, 133, 212, 216, 233, 253; Tokyo, Summer 2020 (postponed), 343; Vancouver-Whistler, Winter 2010, 230, 306. See also counterOlympics; “People’s” or “Counter Olympics”; Women’s Olympics; Workers’ Olympics; Zappas Olympics Ondaatje, Kim, 216

Ondaatje, Michael, 171; In the Skin of a Lion, 13 Onondaga Nation, 91, fig. 12 Ontario Arts Council, 132, 156 Ontario Athletic Camp (now Ontario Student Leadership Centre), 130 Ontario Athletic Commission (OAC), 129–30 Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA), 37 Ontario Games for the Physically Disabled, 141 Ontario Hockey Association, 259 Ontario Human Rights Code (1962), 259 Ontario Press Council, 299 Ontario Senior Games, 141 Ontario Sports Federation, 152 Ontario Summer and Winter Games, 141 Ontario Track and Field Association, 209 Ontario Treasury Board, 154–5 Operation Breadbasket, 145 Order of Canada, fig. 32 Ordia, Abraham, 236–7 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 236–7 Osborne, Robert, 48 Ouellet, Jean-Guy, 305–6 Owen, Don, 1, 59–60, 169 Owens, Jesse, 222 Own the Podium (OTP), 306–7 Pan American Games: San Juan, 1979, 214 Pan and Parapan American Games: Toronto, 2015, 293–4

Paralympics: Vancouver-Whistler, Winter 2010, 306; Toronto 1976, 235. See also Olympiad for the Disabled (now Paralympics) Parent, Sylvie, 263 Parnes, Penny, 336 Parrington, Jack, 30 ParticipAction Canada, 162 Paul, Lowell, 147 The Pavilion (U of T), 327 Pearson, Lester B., 92, 136, 140 Peddie, Richard, 315, 339 Peel, Ann, 331 “People’s” or “Counter Olympics” (Barcelona, 1936), 269, 272 Percival, Lloyd, 86 Peters, Jim, 26 Peterson, David, 293 Peterson, Eric, 219 Petitclerc, Chantal, 342 Phillips, Nathan, 55 Physical Activity and Sport Act (2003), 61, 297, 305, 307 Physical Education and Athletic Centre (AC, U of T) (“Fort Jock”), 207–9, 261 Physically Active Youth (PAY), 332–3 Pickett, John, 18 Pimm, Peter, 200 Piotrowski, Irene, 97 Pirk, Herb, 291 Player, Gary, 232 Plewes, Doris, 106 Plyley, Mike, 311, 317 Police Games: Toronto, 1962, 70; 1961, fig. 9 police violence, 153–4 Pollution Probe, 166

Index 369 Pomerantz, Hart, 164 Ponton, Alex, 14 Poprawski, Bogdan, 199 Porteous, Timothy, 218–19 Porter, Bobby, 14 Pound, Dick, 74, 283, 287–8, 292, 331 Power, Dave, 53, 65, 74, 76 Praxis Research Institute for Social Change, 178 Preobrazenzki, Chris, 224 Preston Rivulettes, 275 Prichard, Rob, 312, 325 Prior, Russ, 225 ProMOTION Plus, 254 Pronger, Brian, 311 Proudfoot, Jim, 18 public recreation, 129–32, 141, 198, 214, 299 Puce, George, 117 Pulford, Bob, 77 Pullen, Judy, 124 Quebec nationalism, 59 Quiet Revolution, 92 Rabinovich, Robert, 109 racial discrimination and racism, 143, 148–51, 189, 212, 277, 281; in sports, 3, 7, 19, 46, 67, 72, 74, 144, 147, 174–5, 228, 231–50, 270, 342 Radforth, Ian, 268 Rae, Bob, 298 Raike, Stan, 30 Rail, Geneviève, 254, 286 Rajasthan Sports Council, 124 Ramphal, Shridath, 241 Ramsamy, Helga, 238–9, 247

370 Index Ramsamy, Sam, 236–9, 243–4, 247– 8, 329, fig. 19 Ray, Mabel, 81, 256 Rayside, David, 200 Razack, Sabrina, 336 Rea, Harold, 141, 153, 157–8 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 243, 246 Red Sport International (RSI), 272–3 Reeve, Ted, 270 Reeve, Vic, 45, 67 Reeves, John, 200 Refugee Olympic Team, 295 Regier, Henry, 173 Regimbal, Maurice, 136 Reid, Tim, 79 Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 187 The Report on the Task Force for Sport for Canadians, 159 Richard, Henri, 152 Richards, Doug, 317 Richards, Trevor, 238 Richardson, Dorothy, 257–8 Richardson, Peter, 201 Right to Play, 328 Rimstead, Paul, 84, 107, 177 Robarts, John, 92, 132, 156–7, 166 Robb, Carol, 201 Robinson, Laura, 254 Robinson, Renault, 149 The Rockpile, 164 Rodney, Lester, 272 Rogge, Jacques, 288, 290 Rose, Murray, 64 Rosen, Earl, 107–8, 112, 119–20, 217–18, fig. 15 Rosenfeld, Fanny “Bobbie,” 83, 210, 270 Ross, Fred, 177

Ross, Murray, 48 Rotstein, Abraham, 178 Rousseau, Roger, 216 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 178 Royal Commission Inquiry into Civil Rights (Ontario), 156–7 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP (McDonald Commission), 178 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 255 Rozsavolgyi, Istvan, 54 Runner (NFB film), 1, 60 Russell, Bertrand, 49 Russell, Peter, 79, 169 Ryerson, Egerton, 191 Ryerson, Stanley, 191 Ryun, Jim, 94 St. Pierre, Simon, 223 St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts, 164 Sakai, Yoshinori, 99 Samaranch, Juan Antonio, 246–7, 288, 343 Sasakamoose, Fred, fig. 26 Saul, John, 245 Savage, Booth, 219 Sax, Joe, 200 Sayao, Carlos, 266 Saywell, Jack, 268 Schachtler, Irene, 286 Schmitt, Don, 326 School of Physical and Health Education (SPHE, U of T), 190–2, 197–8, 200, 204, 309–11, 315–17 Schreyer, Ed, 156

Schul, Bob, 91, 95, 100, 116 Scott, Beckie, 342 Scott, Bud, 38, 52, fig. 3 Scott, Harvey, 183–5, 189 Scott, Jack, 173–5, 183 Scott, John, 108, 115, fig. 15 Scott, Micki, 173 Scott, Reid, 176 Secord, Bob, 141, 152, 161, 227 Sedra, Adel, 311, 315–16 Seelenbinder, Werner, 275 Semenya, Caster, 265 Seppänen, Paavo, 272 Sewell, John, 278 Sewgolum, Papwa, 232 sex test, 220, 264–6, fig. 21 Shah, L.R., 123 Sharma, Kamalesh, 338 Sharp, John, 200 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 122 Sheffe, Nora, 332 Shephard, Roy, 269, 310 Shepherd, George, 41, 70, fig. 3, fig.7 Sherlock, Grace, 28 Sherlock, Sir Phillip, 27–9 Shuster, Roz, 164 Shute, Neville: On the Beach, 71 Silver Relay, 42 Simms, Jim, 57 Simpson, James, 270 Singh, Sawai Ram II, 120 Sisam, Elizabeth, 323–4 Sithole, Tomas, 329 Six Nations of the Grand River, 276, 278, fig. 12 Skilling, Gordon, 80 Sloan, Ireland, 63 Smart, John, 171, 177, 182

Index 371 Smart, Pat, 177 Smith, Al, fig. 3 Smith, Michael, 299 Smith, Sid, 14 Smith, Tommie, 147–51, 182, 212 Smythe, Conn, 3, 78 Snell, George, 88 Snell, Peter, 64, 75, 90 Snider, Jim, 31, 34, 52, fig. 3 Sniderman, Harry, 272 Snow, Michael, 219 Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI), 272–3 Society for Crippled Children (Easter Seals), 86 Sokol, Al, 57 Sopinka, John, 259 South African National Olympic Committee (SANOC), 232–3 South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), 232, 238–40, 246, 329–30, fig. 19 South African Olympic Academy, 249 South African rebel cricket tour: 1990, 246 South African rugby tour: New Zealand, 1981, 241 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 145 Spanish Civil War, 272 Spartakiad, 273 Sport and Recreation Branch (Ontario Department of Education), 141 Sport Canada, 56, 15, 37, 159, 160, 161, 162, 221, 225, 234–244, 264, 284, 297, 300, 302–3, 304, 308, 331

372 Index Sport Canada Research Initiative (SCRI), 306 Sport Canada Women’s Program, 260 Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC), 305–6 “sport for development and peace” (SDP), 328–40 “sport for good,” 81 Sport Information Bureau, 160 Sport Information Resource Centre (SIRC), 106 Sport Quebec, 221 Sports Authority of India, 266 sports for persons with disabilities, 88, 141, 235, 306, 331 sports studies, 4–5, 101, 108–9, 175–6, 184–6, 316 Spotton, John, 60 Spry, Graham, 169 Stanley, Carleton, 270 Steen, Dave, 67, 95, 135 Stimers, Rex, 16 Strachan, Dorothy, 254, 286 Stratas, Teresa, 14 Stratten, Merrily, 311, 317 Strenk, Andrew, 282 Stukus, Annis, 86 Stulack, George, 34 Sugar Bowl Track Meet: New Orleans, 1962, 76 Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA), 235–7 Surgey, June, 201 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 329, 333 Swinton family, 96 Tabori, Laszlo, 53, 59–60 Taillibert, Roger, 227

Tange, Kenzo, 97 Tanner, Elaine, 233 Tarver, Glenn, 18 Task Force on Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Investment (the Watkins report), 167 Task Force on Sport for Canadians, 157–9 Taylor, Bryce (childhood friend and surgeon), 18 Taylor, Bryce (York University) 136, 173 Taylor, Chris, 173 Taylor, Fred “Cyclone,” 189 Taylor, Joe, 63 Telford, John, fig. 3 Temu, Naftali, 134 Tenke, Zoltan, 199 Ter-Ovanesyan, Igor, 54 Tewksbury, Mark, 342 Thatcher, Margaret, 5, 243 Theatre Passe Muraille, 171, 219 Thing, N.E., 219 Thomas, Albie, 95 Thomas, Bud, 131 Thomas, Dorothy, 179 Thomas, John, 54 Thomas, Scott, 317 Thompson, Dan, 198 Thompson, E.P., 183 Thompson, Paul, 171, 219, 221 Thomson, Douglas, 201 Thomson, Nancy, 224 Thornton, Archie, 201 Tillotson, Shirley, 132 #TimesUp, 264 Toronto Island Run, 278 Toronto Maple Leafs, 77, 84–5, 168, 205



Index 373

“Toronto Olympic Commitment,” 291–2 Toronto Pan American Sports Centre, 294, fig. 29 Tousignant, Claude, 219 Triantis, Stephen, 106–7, 123 Trudeau, Pierre, 141, 152–3, 160, 169–70, 179, 216, 234, 241, 244, 282 Truex, Max, 53, 59, 68–9 Tuchili, Abigail, 334 Tulloh, Bruce, 70, 75, 80, 134, fig. 16 Tyus, Wyomia, 150 L’Union générale des étudiants du Québec (UGEQ), 108 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 265, 295 United States National Students’ Association (USNSA), 108 University College (U of T), 62–3, 200 University of Chicago, 142 University of Chicago Track Club (UCTC), 144, 146–8 University of Rajasthan, 120 University of Toronto (U of T), 2, 4, 32–3, 49–50, 62, 78–9, 200–1, 257, 260–1, 309–27, fig. 30 University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA), 201 University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC), fig. 29 University of Toronto Track Club, 33, 199, 334 UN Register of Sports Contacts, 245 US championships: Walnut, CA, 1962, 69

US cross-country championship: 1961, 63; 1963, 93 US indoor circuit, 51–5, 57, 65, 89–91, 94–5 van der Wal, Hylke, 83 Vanier Cup, 313 Van Loon, Nelles, 108, 112, 115, fig. 15 Van Ryn, Joe, 332 van Vliet, Maury, 136 Varsity Stadium, 32, 40, 204, 312, 322–3, 326–7, fig. 9, fig. 28 Victoria College (U of T), 62 Vigneault, Gilles, 283 Vincent, Trevor, fig. 24 Viren, Lasse, 228–9 Virgin, William, 104, 124 Viscount Alexander Award, 83 Wadge, Anne, 39 the Waffle (NDP caucus), 165, 170–1, 177–9, 182 Walker, John, 235–6 Wallace, Elizabeth, 72 Wallingford, Ron, 32, 37, 44, 109, 111 Ward, Douglas, 92, 108 Ward, Jim, 124 Ward, Sheila, 124 Wardle, Thomas “Tommy,” 176–7 “Waterworks Boys,” 12 Watkins, Mel, 167, 171, 177, 200 Watson, Jim, 293 Watson, Ron, 138 Webb, Jim, 85 Weber, Eugen, 183 Weiland, Joyce, 171, 217 Weinzweig, John, 217 Wells, Cassandra, 336

374 Index White, Bob, 298 White, Dalt, 135 White, Willye, 148 White City Stadium, 69, 75 Whitfield, Mel, 148 Whitson, David, 79 Willard, Frank, 131 Williams, Lynn (United Steelworkers), 177 Williams, Lynn (Canadian distance runner), 244 Williams, Paul, 200, 244, 301 Williams, Percy, 322 Williamson, Chris, 91, 93 Wingerson, Jennifer, 83 Winters, Kyle, 317 Wipper, Kirk, 193, 198 Wise, S.F, 159 Wittenberg, Ray, 131 Wolde, Mamo, 102 women and girls in sport: amateur boxing, 298; association for advancement, 307–8; CBC coverage, 299; Coubertin’s opposition, 285; early leaders in Canada, 81; equity at U of T, 202, 204; EYTC, 30; feminist policies, 183, 185, 187; feminists sports international, 274; first at indoor meet, 90; first national conference, 188; FISU, 109, 135; “golden age of women’s sports,” 19–20; health issues, 332; homophobia, 343; in India, 125; inequity, 344; neglect of, 280; new programs, 331; Olympic commitment, 292; opportunities for, 249, 251–66; soccer, 329; US track stars, 55; Workers’ Olympics Vienna 1931, 273.

See also gender-based violence; gender bias; gender equity Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada (WAAF), 256, 274–5, 279 Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), 254, 259 women’s liberation, 146 Women’s Olympics: Gothenburg, 1926, 274; Paris, 1922, 274 WomenSport International, 254 Women’s World Games: London, 1934, 274; Prague, 1930, 274 Wool, Ira, 147 Wootten, Lloyd “Moon,” 16 Workers’ Olympics (Olympiad): Antwerp, 1937, 273; Vienna, 1931, 273 Workers’ Sports Association of Canada (WSA), 270, 272–3, 279 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), 265, 288 World Athletics. See International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in Athletics: Helsinki, 1983, 223; Rome, 1987, 302 World Health Organization, 265 World Medical Association, 265 World Professional Marathon Championship, 1909, 277 World Sport Games, CSIT, 273 World Student Games (Universiade), 108, 127, 314; Budapest, 1965, 108–9, 112, 116; Tokyo, 1967, 128, 135–6 Worrall, Jim, 108, 133, 214, 269, 287 Worsfold, Stan, 31, 44, 52, 83



Index 375

Wright, Dwayne, 108, 112, 122, fig. 15

Young, Scott, 47, 78 Youth Olympic Games, 290

Yack, Norman “Baby,” 272 Yard, Ted, 23 Yetman, Wayne, 228 Yifter, Miruts, 228 YMCA, 15, 79 York University, 268 Yorzyk, Bill, 34

Zakus, David, 336 Zápotek, Emil, 26, 40, 44, 75 Zappas Olympics: Athens, 1870, 117 Zeigler, Earle, 191–2, 310 Zimny, Kazimierz, 45 Zwolak, Vic, 93

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Courtesy of Hart House

bruce kidd is a former Olympic athlete, member of C ­ anada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has been a lifelong advocate of human rights and has worked with local, national, and international bodies to advance sport for all. A professor emeritus in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, he currently serves as U of T ombudsperson.