Fulfilling the final wish of a guardian angel to many

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/12/2016 (3223 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a request like none other I’ve received.

A last wish, of a kind, from an 86-year-old man, delivered via email on Tuesday by one of his daughters.

“Good morning Mr. Sinclair,

“I am contacting you on behalf of my father, John Debroni, as he mentioned that you used to play football for him with the Winnipeg Hawkeyes. Sadly, he is in the final stages of his life at Riverview with terminal kidney cancer. As we reminisced yesterday he specifically mentioned how much he would like to speak with you about the Hawkeyes…”

Lynne Gauthier’s message arrived at 8:51 a.m. By 9:03 a.m. I had created an opening for that afternoon.

For the record, I didn’t play for the Hawkeyes, the juvenile league juggernaut of a team coached by John’s younger brother, Mike Debroni, that won four national championships in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also helped to nurture future Blue Bombers Gord Patterson, Leo Ezerins and Bob Toogood.

I did play for a Hawkeyes feeder team, the midget West End Raiders, but in those days, it was all one big football family.

John was not only the Hawkeyes’ most prominent founding father — he had also taken on the role as their chief fundraiser.

By the time I arrived at the Riverview Health Centre Tuesday afternoon, there was another kind of father visiting John, although when I walked into the room the man in the bed didn’t look like someone who needed a Ukrainian Catholic priest. Not yet. John was all smiles.

“So how are you keeping?” John asked, before I could ask him the same.

When I returned the question, John said, “I don’t know. Clear blue sky.”

Of course, he did know how he was doing.

“Stage 4,” he volunteered.

As for that “clear blue sky” comment, at first I took it to be a reference to the view out his window on that unseasonably warm late December day — but on reflection, it could have had another meaning: what this life-long man of faith sees in the heaven above that awaits him.

“You look good,” I told him.

John thanked me with a smile and began telling those stories he wanted to share about the Hawkeyes, the players he remembers most, and how and why the team was formed back in the 1950s.

John recalled sitting around having coffee with some guys at the Quality Grill next to the Billy Mosienko bowling lanes on Main Street.

The North End’s only juvenile football club had folded.

“So I said to the guys, ‘Why don’t we start up a team?’”

And with that, the four of them did. John’s duty was to mark the field on Sunday mornings and to drive all over the city and area, delivering 25-cent Bomber game day pool tickets, from Headingley to Lockport.

With that money they managed to buy an old Modern Dairies milk truck and turned it into the team’s first clubhouse.

John had never played football and he was only in his mid-20s when the Hawkeyes were given their name, but that didn’t matter.

What did matter was why John and the others created the team.

His wife, Eleanore, who was sitting with us beside his bed, explained why, as John had explained it to her.

‘They started a football club so the kids of the North End had something to do, instead of getting into trouble.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

As it turned out, though, the brothers Debroni — John and Mike — would recruit players from all over the city; from St. James, from Grant Park and from the West End.

John remembered two from the West End, in particular. Their marks weren’t good enough for them to play for the Daniel McIntyre High School team and when the principal heard what was happening he called John to say he would suspend them if they played for the Hawkeyes.

“I said, ‘You suspend them, I’ll sue you’… I never heard any more about that.”

One boy, John still remembered, had a 55 per cent average, the other a 51, so he instructed them to start studying.

“I said, ‘Believe me, you’ll thank me.’”

One of them would end up doing just that.

His marks improved so much that he was presented with the Governor General’s Academic Medal.

Later in his life, John remembers meeting him by chance on the corner of Portage Avenue and Edmonton Street.

John was smiling again as he told the rest the story.

He recalled congratulating the young man.

“Thank you, sir,” the Hawkeyes player said.

“I said, ‘What do you mean, sir? It’s John.’ He said, ‘As long as I’m alive, you’ll be called ‘sir’ for what you did for me.’”

As he continued to talk and I continued to listen, something else became quite evident.

His invitation to me had nothing to do with the success of the Hawkeyes as a national championship football team and everything to do with all the young men his volunteer work had helped.

John Debroni’s work in the background really represents so many volunteers over so many decades who have marked the football fields and flooded the hockey rinks and coached the boys on their paths to becoming men.

And who deserve our appreciation, because they did that with the kind of devotion that never dies.

After I left John’s room on Tuesday, the others arrived to show their gratitude; the Hawkeyes from the past that his daughter Lynne had reached out to made their way to visit with the man with the smile and the stories.

Friday, after former players such as Toogood, Doug Finkbeiner and Jim Ballance had stopped in to see John, Lynne told me it was the greatest gift her father and his family could have received at this time and at this late hour of his life.

Actually, it was John Debroni who gave us the most rewarding of Christmas gifts.

And that was the present of being in his “clear blue sky” presence.

“Thank you, sir.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca