The Georgetown International Bantam Hockey Tournament: the Highlight of Easter Season, 1960-1964
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Bantam Tournament – THE GEORGETOWN VAULT
In 1960, when I was eight years old, my Easter season was magically transformed, raised to an ethereal level, with the inauguration of the Georgetown International Bantam Hockey Tournament.
For the next four Easters, until our family moved to London, Ontario in the summer of 1964, the tournament was the high point of my often lonely and miserable existence.
The players, who seemed like giants with gruff unmodulated voices and nascent teenage whiskers, came from far and wide, including from the good old U.S.A., the land of J.F.K., Ed Sullivan, and Bonanza.
I simply moved into the arena for the duration of the event.
In those days, behind the nets, there were these little boxes where, if you arrived early enough, you could pretend to be the goal judge and press the red light whenever a puck crossed the goal line.
Each day of the tournament, I installed myself as honorary goal judge before the first puck was dropped.
Except when the team from Winnipeg was playing.
Why Winnipeg?
Well, Winnipeg was my father’s home town and I grew up on family stories rooted in that Prairie location.
Kids often have a blind loyalty to their kith and kin and believe that their family origins and possessions are best. I was no exception. Even though my dad, Jim McBryde, was in many ways an irascible, mercurial figure, who exerted a form of tyranny in our family sphere through his wildly unpredictable moods, I still adopted, and fiercely defended, his preferences and his native city as if they were my own.
So I would leave the goal judge box to sit behind the Winnipeg bench whenever they played, and would cry hot tears whenever they lost. Their defeats felt like a slap in the face to my dad, who didn’t care a fig about hockey; but at some unconscious level I didn’t want Jim McBryde to lose, or to lose Jim McBryde, who may have already been irretrievably lost.
One of the many highlights of the tournament was the annual lucky draw. I scrounged the necessary pocket money to buy a ticket, and in 1963, I actually drew the winning number, receiving a wrist watch, which remained a prize possession for years to come.
It was the first and last time I ever won a draw, and for many years, this victory over blind fate served to assuage my sense that I was an abject loser.
The Georgetown International Bantam Hockey Tournament, coinciding as it did with the advent of spring, became an unadulterated source of childhood sanctuary and joy, while the memories remain as beacons of possibility, and of sheer happiness.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
