Home is where the hockey hero is

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/08/2016 (3409 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The man I’ve come to call “Mr. Winnipeg” is seated in his favourite living room armchair, lamenting the windblown loss of a tree with more age rings than he can count that still lies on the backyard lawn like a friend he can’t leave.

“I just about cried when the old maple went down,” Ab McDonald says.

His own roots in Winnipeg — and the 80 age rings that go with them — go even deeper in his lifelong backyard than his beloved fallen friend, the maple.

Not that Winnipeg is the only world Ab knew, of course.

Just a few minutes earlier, a reminder of that world and that past arrived at his front door. A world the seventh of seven children dreamed about while growing up in working-class Weston, a dream that came true over a National Hockey League career where he played on four consecutive Stanley Cup-winning teams.

It was a Canada Post mail carrier who delivered that reminder in a package mailed from the United States. Inside it were half a dozen pucks and some playing cards from a guy in Santa Monica, Calif., who was hoping Ab would sign them.

“I get three or four of them — not pucks —but letters every week,” he said by way of putting the contents and the request in context.

The pucks are from some of the six teams — Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, St. Louis and Pittsburgh — he played with from 1958 until 1972, when he returned to Winnipeg as the World Hockey Association Jets’ first captain and first goal scorer. He keeps his own hockey history in his basement in the form of team sweaters, photos and two miniature Stanley Cups from the 1960 champion Canadiens and the 1961 champion Black Hawks, who beat Montreal with Ab’s help. 

But during all those years in all those cities, Ab McDonald did something Hockey Hall of Fame Winnipeggers Andy Bathgate and Terry Sawchuk were never known to do.

“We always came back in the summertime,” Ab says, as he lounges in his hockey T-shirt, sports shorts and flip-flops looking fit and healthy and, yes, as happy as ever.

When Cindy East, one of his and wife Pat’s five children, once asked her father why they always came back for the summer, he explained it in a word.

 

Family.

“I’m a Winnipegger,” is how he explains it to me.

Pat, as one might expect, is a Winnipegger, too, the youngest of five daughters who grew up in St. Vital and who sees the girls she went to school with. As does Ab with the guys from his Winnipeg past.  

They originally met the way it sometimes happens here, where everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you. They met at someone else’s wedding.

“I’m a Winnipegger,” Ab repeats, “and a proud Canadian. And us Canadians, we don’t shoot our mouths off, I don’t think. You know? And it’s been great. The kids loved it here. And what’s not to love. We’ve been in this house for 49 years. Since 1967.”

Then he explained reasons — besides being on high ground and away from flood-prone areas of the city — they settled in their St. James bungalow.

“We loved the yard.”

“The summers here,” he says on this summer day after high winds from the night before damaged their backyard plum tree, “have always been beautiful.”

It was the Winnipeg winters, though — mostly using hand-me-down skates and sticks he hoped wouldn’t break on the first shot — that allowed Ab to make the Winnipeg summers beautiful for his family, allowed him during his playing years to own a house in St. Vital, which they rented out during the hockey season so they had a permanent place to live when they came home.

And when he came home during those playing years, he would work; first as a vacation fill-in salesman at Robin Hood Flour and later for Molson, as a beer-sharing, golf-playing Manitoba travelling “ambassador” for the brewery.

Paradise found.

Especially for a humble hockey legend and a big affable, old-school gentleman with an easy smile and a firm handshake. 

All of that, I hope, explains why we still love Ab McDonald here, and why I call him not just Mr. Winnipeg Hockey but Mr. Winnipeg in a quintessential way. And which is why — combined with his hockey career and his upcoming 80th birthday — Manitoba Special Olympics is celebrating Ab McDonald next month for what he has given them over the years as a volunteer honorary chairman. Bobby Hull, among others, will be there, younger brother Dennis Hull will speak and, well, that explains why I went to visit Ab this week. The cocktail party and meet-and-greet is Sept. 15 at the Victoria Inn.

I want Winnipeg to come out and pay tribute to someone who has made us proud by exemplifying the essence of what’s best about the people of this city.

The hockey legend who never forgot where he came from, because he never really left.

The four-time Stanley Cup winner who chose his home as his children’s home.

And whose Cup still runneth over.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca