Because of the pandemic and the fact that I have been defined as a person with a very fragile health "syndrome", I spend a lot of time in seclusion from the outside world. I do spend time on my front veranda watching the world go by. During these quiet times I often reflect on the past soon-to-be 79 years of life that I have experienced. I reflect on what these experiences have meant to me. Some of them have been very positive and some of them were sad and some were of the type that I would like a "redo" in.
The other day I reflected on my time as a timekeeper at the old Winnipeg Arena. There were many memories. I was fortunate to be able to meet and talk with many classy and classic athletes and notables. Three encounters that I really enjoyed came to mind.
I was fortunate enough to do the game between the NHL Old-timers and a local team of police officers. This game was a fundraiser. What made it memorable for me was that Maurice "Rocket" Richard and the inimitable "Red" Storey were the referees. They would stand beside me while waiting for the teams to skate onto the ice before each period and there was a lot of banter exchanged among us. Here were two men whom I had admired very much on the Saturday night NHL TV broadcasts. And they included me in their conversations like I was a long-standing member of their circle.
A second memory is a little bittersweet. I was the penalty timekeeper in a game between our Canadian National hockey team which at the time was based in Winnipeg and the visiting Russian national hockey team. Valeri Kharmalov who was one of the top hockey forwards in the world, pro or amateur, had taken a rare penalty. As he sat in the penalty box, he was behind me and slightly to my right. He immediately tried his very broken English on me to ask me a question. I replied in Ukrainian which has many similarities to Russian. His face broke into a big smile as his knowledge of Ukrainian was far better than his grasp of English. He asked me many questions about timekeeping. One I remembered was why our clock counted down instead of the European way of counting up. Our conversation came to a halt as his time was up and he swung back into action. He took a second penalty in the third period. It wasn't a good call but then he wasn't worried because his team was up by several goals. Again we started to converse. I learned from him that big "Rags" Ragulin, the Russian behemoth of a defenseman, was actually very much a "pussycat" off the ice. Valerie also wanted to know if all Canadian women were as pretty as the ones at the game. Than he asked me if I wanted his hockey stick. I replied that I would be honored by his gift. He said that his coach and manager would not like him giving away a perfectly good stick. With that comment, he partly cracked the handle with his skate, waved it at the Russian bench that he needed a new stick, and gave his "broken one to me with the name of Kharmalov printed on it in Cyrillic letters. It became very precious to me when news out of Russia that his life and promising career were cut short when he and his wife and sister-in-law died in a car crash.
The third memory out of the cobwebs of the past came from a game I was timekeeping between the Harlem globetrotters and their perennial losing opponents, the Washington Generals. In that game, the star attraction of the Globetrotters, Meadowlark Lemon, took great pleasure in chasing balls that went out of bounds near the timekeeper's area and then coming over and leaning over my shoulder to push switches on the clock as he fired questions at me and tried to ignore the poor referees. After every such encounter I had to do a lot of readjusting of the clock. At the end of the game he came over and said I had been a really good sport about being part of their act and he gave me an autographed copy of the program.
I was so very fortunate to be able to meet and talk with many great personalities and many great athletes, their coaches and managers, and some of their family members.
