Significance of Sports

SIGNIFICANCE OF SPORTS

Bob Feller stated:

Every day is a new opportunity!

You can build on yesterday's success

or put failures behind ~ start all over again.

That's the way life is ~ a new game every day ~

(and that's the way baseball is)!

Sports build good habits, confidence and discipline.

They make players into community leaders

and teach them how to strive for a goal....handle mistakes...and cherish

growth opportunities, confessed Julie Foudy.

Badgers Win Entertaining Debut

“New basketball team makes its case for a place on Hamilton's sporting landscape,”

wrote Scott Radley recently in The Spec.

“Generations from now when lecture halls of historians gather to recount the glorious story of the Hamilton Honey Badgers ~ optimism is always good ~ they will tell of the team's monunental victory in the opening game. On Sunday afternoon in a chilly First Ontario Centre, the Canadian Elite Basketball League team in gold and black uniforms beat the Edmonton Stingers 106-83 to to launch a new era in local hoops. Pro basketball's first female coach ~ GM, Chantal Valleee earned her first win!

“I was aware and I understand the significance of this,” she says.

“What really hit me is the amount of women who came to me and said,

'I came to the game to support you!'

Dance Enhances Physical and Emotional Well-being!

She's on the dance floor...grey-haired and alone...charmingly dancing to the rhythm.

Dancing for her ~ is a fitness solution.

To all who noticed her photo, she commented,

Dance is healthy at any age ~ but especially for older adults.

Since dance is a multi-tasking activity,

it requires mental, physical, emotional and social skills

making it very stimulating for the brain in general.

Atop the World ~ with a 'Precious' Record

Jeff Mahoney's writing captured my attention:

Gordon Precious, 95, who helped start

Chedoke ski hill, is the world's oldest heli-skier.

Why to me, it this significant? I was a skier and for many years skied nearly every winter weekend. When my son was born,,,and to reshape my body to fitness level...every Saturday I skied ( leaving the babe with his 'Daddy'). When my little boy turned 5, I took him to Chedoke ski hills....teaching him to snow-plow on easy slopes. And when the following winter he was 6, I placed him in children's ski classes. Every winter he skied...until when Glen Eden in Milton opened... took him there to ski with me. Enjoying the sport, he often skied weekend trips...and when approaching his teens, he thoroughly was thrilled to join Shirley and me for a very cold and icy end of Janauary winter ski week in the Laurentian Mountains north of Quebec City. When university days began, time and money was at a premium. Once or twice, he joined other students on designated ski-weekends.

In March, Hamilton-born Gordon Precious set a world record:

for being the world's oldest heli-skier

after completing a run in the Cariboo Mountains with his grandson, Trevor Young.

“When Gordon Precious found himself perched atop Nectar mountain in the towering Cariboos of B.C. this March, he had one question: Watching the helicopter he arrived in, peel itself away from the summit...on its way back to base, without him in it, and he said to no one in particular:

How the h__ do I get down from here?

He's long been an expert skier ~ starting when he was 12 ~ but he admits to being 'panic stricken'!

Below him stretched a sheer steep drop of hitherto untouched snow. Probably, no other human had ever before seen this particular vista (it sure wasn't the 'bunny-hill' at Glen Eden) ~ so it was uncharted territory he was going into. You might ask, Who would leave a 95-year old man ~ yes, Gordon is 95, at the top of a mountain, at an age when most people don't feel comfortabkle facing a flight of stairs?

Who? Why? His grandson, Trevor Young, of course.

Gordon, over the course of his long, rich life so far, has skied in Lebanon, Iran...in the foot of the Himalayas...(again with grandson, Trevor)...Switzerland, France, Italy, Whistler and Mont Tremblant.

And, of course, the Chedoke hill in Hamilton, which he helped start.

But the long run down the virgin slopes in the Cariboo Mountains

is the one that's earned him a place in the Guiness World Records:

'the oldest heli-skier' ever.

“When I meet him at the Granite Club, where he plays tennis, h'e just put in a morning on the courts.

As he says 'hello' I'm tempted to ask if he ever gets carded at the liquor store. He's trim and fit...his teeth as white as his hair...and his white hair is abundant, downward flowing as a fresh base of silky snow on a handsome mountain.

“Gordon was born in Hamilton in 1924 ~ and stayed 71 years

before retiring to Toronto, with his first wife Jeanne,

from the independent insurance business he ran.

He was a true city builder here ~ not the least of his contributions

being that ski hill at Chedoke, which opened in 1964 (closed in 2003).

“He enjoyed skiing as well as tennis from an early age.

When young, and got better at skiing, we'd go to Cedar Springs ~

but I was 15 and not allowed to drive ~ so I'd go with 16-year-old friends who were.

Once, there were 4 of us in the car.

Our names were Precious, Love, Darling and...Anquish.

Michael Jordan states:

I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.

26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.

I”ve failed over and over again in my life.

And ~ that is why I succeed.

The foregoing assembled by Merle Baird-Kerr...July 16, 2019

To respond:mbairdkerr@cogeco.ca