Hal Trumble, hockey executive (1926-2010)

Team USA manager Hal Trumble, goalie Carl Wetzel and coach Murray Williamson pose on the ice in 1971.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 25, 2010

The American hockey official Hal Trumble fought unsuccessfully to keep professional hockey players out of the Olympic Games.

“It would ruin our program,” Mr. Trumble declared in 1986.

As executive director of the Amateur Hockey Association of the United States, now USA Hockey, Mr. Trumble had built a system in which college players deferred their own pro careers to compete for the United States at the Olympics.

His Canadian counterparts were eager to get professionals into the Winter Games and, in time, the Olympics opened the door to unrestricted participation of National Hockey League stars.

Mr. Trumble managed the amateur U.S. hockey team, featuring future hockey stars Mark Howe and Robbie Ftorek, that won an unexpected silver medal at the Sapporo Olympics in 1972.

He served as head of the Amateur Hockey Association for 15 years, a time during which the game enjoyed strong growth, especially following the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” gold-medal victory at the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid, N.Y.

Mr. Trumble was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1985 and into the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in 1999.

He was the author of the 1975 guide, “Coaching Youth Ice Hockey.”

Mr. Trumble refereed the deciding game of the 1968 Olympic tournament, as the Soviet Union defeated Canada 5-0 for the gold medal. Canada took the bronze. He was also a qualified international umpire in softball and baseball.

Harold L. Trumble Jr. was born on Aug. 28, 1926, at Minneapolis. He died on March 5 at San Clemente, Calif. He was 83. He leaves Ida Mae, his wife of 36 years; two sons; two stepdaughters; six grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and, a sister.

Louis Holmes, hockey player (1911-2010)

Louis Holmes takes a twirl on the ice. BELOW: Holmes with the Portland Buckaroos.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 24, 2010

VICTORIA

The career of Louis Holmes resembled that of many of his Depression-era peers — long winters spent in the minors with a stint in the National Hockey League so brief as to seem a dream.

He toiled in American hockey outposts for several seasons, returning to Edmonton each summer for regular employment.

The hometown newspaper referred to the indefatigable skater as The Man With the Rubber Legs.

His greatest hockey accomplishment came not on the ice, but behind the bench, as he guided the amateur Edmonton Mercurys to the Olympic gold medal in 1952.

For a half-century, he was remembered as the last coach of a Canadian gold medal-winning Olympic hockey team, a designation he happily surrendered, at long last, when Canada finally triumphed again at the 2002 Winter Games.

His great longevity — he died six weeks after turning 99 — also earned him unofficial acknowledgement as the oldest living former NHL player.

Sadly, he suffered from dementia in his final years, denying historians an opportunity for further insight into hockey of the 1930s. Mr. Holmes made his NHL debut in only the third season during which forward passing was permitted in the attacking zone.

Mr. Holmes also belonged to the list of players whose offspring also played in the NHL. Interestingly, Holmes father and son managed to score just one goal each in their NHL careers.

Louis Charles Carter Holmes was born to Ellen (nee Carter) and Charles Holmes in a Staffordshire mining town known for limestone quarries and coal collieries. His father was a miner. The family emigrated to Canada when the boy was aged 18 months. His father, also an ardent gardener, found work as a greenskeeper. The family lived near the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton and it is believed Louis learned to skate on its frozen, winding expanse.

A smooth skating stride and stylish play for his junior team won the notice of Bill Tobin of the Chicago Black Hawks, who signed the prospect.

The 5-foot-10 forward weighed just 150 pounds, a scarecrow on skates.

In 1931, at age 20, the rookie travelled by train through Winnipeg to attend camp in Minnesota.

“I trained with Chicago at Duluth before being farmed to Pittsburgh for experience,” he recalled many years later. “However, the Hawks got away badly and the first thing I knew a wire came ordering me to report back to the big-league team.”

He left the Yellow Jackets to report to the parent club for a game to be played in raucous Chicago Stadium on Dec. 2, 1931.

The Hawks had suffered two consecutive losses, and no longer had the services of defenceman Helgy Bostrom, whose tendon had been slashed by an opponent’s skate. They next faced the Montreal Canadiens, the defending Stanley Cup champions.

Mr. Holmes remembered being in “something of a daze” as he changed into his hockey gear in a dressing room shared with the likes of NHL stars Clarence (Taffy) Abel, Harold (Mush) March, and goaltender Chuck Gadiner.

Wearing uniform No. 9, much later to be made famous by Bobby Hull, he stepped onto the ice with his teammates to a roar which he would never forget.

“Nothing ever gave me the lift I got that night,” Mr. Holmes said.

In the third period, the great Howie Morenz scored for the visitors to tie the score at 1-1. With a few minutes remaining, Canadiens goalkeeper George Hainsworth tripped a Chicago player. The goalie was banished to the penalty box for two minutes. (The rule was later changed so goalie infractions could be served by another player.) Tommy Cook scored what would be the winning goal by driving the puck past an overmatched Albert (Battleship) Leduc filling in between the posts.

The boney Mr. Holmes played 41 games in his debut season. So smooth was the rookie’s skating that a team publicist concocted a fanciful story about the young man perfecting his stride by delivering mail on skates along the frozen rivers and sloughs of northern Alberta.

He scored one goal and four assists, while being assessed three minor penalties while mostly used in spot duty.

The goal was scored at Maple Leafs Gardens on Feb. 27, 1932, in the arena’s first season of service. The home team’s Red Horner, a defenceman paired with the legendary King Clancy, had just scored the game’s first marker.

“Less than a minute later the Hawks got the equalizer when Holmes planted the puck in the net following a speedy exchange of passes inside the Toronto blue line,” the Globe reported.

The goal was scored against Lorne Chabot.

Early in his sophomore season with Chicago, Mr. Holmes was replaced by the unpromisingly named Clarence (Pudge) Mackenzie.

After his demotion, Mr. Holmes found himself skating for the St. Paul (Minn.) Greyhounds. The deprivations of the Depression hurt the box office. Only 871 paying customers watched the Greyhounds defeat the St. Louis Flyers, 2-1, in a match played three days before Christmas in 1932. The normally mild-mannered Mr. Holmes exchanged punches with Pete Palangio, a rare display of fisticuffs by two players with a reputation for a lawful adherence to the rules. (Mr. Palangio, who died in 2004, aged 95, was so pacific that he was employed as a chocolate dipper for a candy manufacturer.)

Though he did not yet know it, Mr. Holmes’ NHL career was over after just 59 games. He embarked on an hockey odyssey that would have him skate for the Tulsa (Okla.) Oilers, Oakland (Calif.) Clippers, Spokane (Wash.) Clippers, Oklahoma City Warriors, and Portland Buckaroos.

The swift forward had his best season in 1938-39, scoring 34 goals and 40 assists in 48 games to lead the Pacific Coast League in scoring. The Buckaroos also won the league championship.

Family lore has it that his future wife spotted him skating in a game during which she leaned over to tell her mother, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

After the United States entered the Second World War, Mr. Holmes returned to Edmonton to play amateur hockey.

By 1946, he was the playing coach of the senior intermediate New Method Laundry team, sponsored by the business for which he made deliveries. The amateur club won the provincial title with an 8-7 overtime victory over a squad from Coleman, Alta. The victors were each presented a “Flying Wing” razor set.

Mr. Holmes won the Allan Cup, emblematic of senior hockey supremacy, with the Edmonton Flyers in 1948.

Four years later, he was coaching the Edmonton Mercurys, a team sponsored by Jim Christiansen, the owner of a local automobile dealership.

Before arriving in Norway for the Olympics, the team endured a long tour of the continent. The Merks defeated a team in Krefeld, West Germany, by 14-2 with the 41-year-old coach dressing for the game, managing even to score a goal.

On a highway in Sweden, the team bus crashed into a tree.

“The wheels locked as we rounded a curve on the highway and the bus went over a ditch and toppled against a tree,” the coach said a few days later. “The players were tossed around and we were lucky to get out with only slight injuries.”

One player suffered cuts to his face, another to his arm, while a third complained of a sore back. They defeated a Swedish team that night by 7-2.

At Oslo, the Mercurys had little problem handling their opponents, winning seven consecutive games before tying the United States, 3-3, to claim the gold medal. It was the only gold won by Canada at the Olympics that year. The Canadians outscored their opponents 71-14 in the Olympic tournament.

One of the final games in which Mr. Holmes laced up his skates came in 1954, when he joined a pickup squad of all-stars for a charity game against the junior Edmonton Oil Kings, whose captain was his son, Chuck Holmes.

The younger Holmes also played briefly in the NHL, dressing with Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings for 23 games. He scored his lone goal against Bruce Gamble of the Boston Bruins in 1962.

The Mercurys, including their coach, were inducted into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame in 1968 and the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 2002. His Edmonton Flyers squad of 1947-48 has also been honoured by the Alberta hall.

Mr. Holmes kept his Olympic medal, encased in plastic, atop the family television.

Louis Charles Carter Holmes was born on Jan. 29, 1911, at Walsall, Staffordshire, England. He died at Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton on March 11. He was 99. At the time of his death, he was believed to be the oldest surviving former National Hockey League player.

He leaves sons Charles Holmes , known as Chuck, of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Greg Holmes, of Calgary; a daughter, Gail Plican, of Surrey, B.C.; five grandchildren; and, five great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife of 63 years, the former Helen Ruth Coulson, known as Buddy, who died in 1997.

The Edmonton Mercurys pose for a team shot in the dressing room. Coach Louis Holmes is standing on the right in a suit and tie.

A pioneer marvels at today's athletes

Bill Inkster shoots hoops from his 'chair. He played for Canada at the 1976 and 1980 Paralympics. He was a veteran on the Vancouver Cablecars team with such rookies as Rick Hansen and Terry Fox. BELOW: Stan Stronge was a soccer goalkeeper before his injury.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 17, 2010

VICTORIA

Sitting in his apartment in Terrace, Bill Inkster marvels at the Paralympians on television.

The cross-country skiers? “Amazing.”

The downhill skiers? “How do they do it and keep their balance? Holy man!”

The sledge hockey players?

“That’s a rough game,” he says. “They bang each other around really good.”

He pauses, laughs softly.

“And I thought basketball was rough.”

Mr. Inkster, 69, has thickened at the waist since his playing days. He wears his jet black hair combed back. He speaks in the measured tones of a man in no hurry.

Though you will never hear him say it, his own pioneering efforts helped contribute to making the Paralympics what they are today.

A proud Tahltan from Telegraph Creek, he grew up along the Stikine River. Hunting provided the large family of four boys and four girls plenty of deer, moose and caribou, as well as smaller game. “Beaver’s good,” he says. “All they do is eat bark off trees. And they’re always fat.”

They had no electricity or running hot water. They shut off the water pipes in winter. Young Willie, as he was known, played outfield on a boy’s softball team in summer, went skiing a few times when the local Catholic priest organized a youth ski club.

After school on a Friday, he and friend would walk 20 kilometres to a favourite fishing hole, camping overnight, returning in time for class on Monday morning.

“A Tom Sawyer type of existence,” he says. “A great life.”

On a fall day, he and an uncle went into the forest to cut wood about seven kilometres from their home. The boy scurried up a tree. Even all these years later, he recites the date as though it was a birthday — Nov. 23, 1957.

He remembers waking at the base of the tree. He had landed on his head. His face began to swell.

“My uncle was talking to me,” he recalls. “I told him I couldn’t move my legs.”

The uncle built a camp fire, lifted the boy into a sleeping bag, placed a tent over him. He then hiked back to Telegraph Creek to get help.

They hauled him to town. He was flown to hospital in Whitehorse by the legendary bush pilot Bud Harbottle. The diagnosis — the T9 and T10 vertebrae were broken, one completely.

“I was devastated,” he says. “No different than anybody else.”

They transferred him to Vancouver. He spent more than a year in hospital, including his 18th birthday, his day filled by appointments with physiotherapists and occupational therapists.

A fellow named Stan Stronge came to visit. He had been a champion soccer goalkeeper with provincial and national championships, as well as prestigious starting assignments against visiting English teams. A versatile athlete, he had played baseball and been a competitive swimmer.

On a blustery night in the fall of 1940, a southeast wind swept across the Lower Mainland, causing minor damage. Mr. Stronge was driving in North Vancouver when a 22.8-metre (75-foot) hemlock toppled onto his car. Mr. Stronge, the storm’s only victim, would not walk on a soccer pitch ever again.

The athlete turned his attention to organizing wheelchair sports, which had more possible participants as the numbers of war wounded grew. In 1950, Mr. Stronge helped form the Dueck Powerglides wheelchair basketball team.

The team’s first exhibition match, at the new War Memorial Gymnasium on the University of British Columbia campus, attracted a crowd of 2,700.

The Powerglides were a local powerhouse. On a tour of the region, they challenged teams of able-bodied athletes who used wheelchairs. The Powerglides won 74 of 75 games.

The team’s roster included men who’d lost mobility from polio, or from car wrecks, or from logging accidents. One player, Pat Bell, had been shot in the back while trying to rob a bank.

The team was sponsored by a car dealership for which Doug Mowat was a night tire salesman. Mr. Mowat, who had become a paraplegic at age 17 from injuries suffered at a party, later was later elected to the Legislature under the Social Credit banner.

Mr. Stronge invited Mr. Inkster to join the basketball squad. He’d only ever once before played the game, but, in time, he became a stalwart forward.

Mr. Inkster took part in wheelchair basketball as part of disabled games held following the Pan-Am Games at Winnipeg in 1967. Four years later, he finished third in archery at the disabled Pan-Ams in Jamaica. “The greatest bronze medal you’ll ever see,” he says today. The next year he set a national record at the Canadian National Wheelchair Games at Calgary. He also competed at the 1976 Paralympics in Toronto the 1980 Paralympics in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Mr. Inkster continued to roll across the parquet. The Powerglides got a new sponsorship from a cable-television company, so the team became the Cablecars.

By then, he was a savvy veteran, used sparingly as young guns took on the responsibility of ensuring the team’s dominance.

One of them was Terry Fox.

“A lot of determination,” Mr. Inkster says. “A hard worker.”

Another was Rick Hansen.

“Tremendous athlete,” he adds.

Once, a wheelchair was seen as a mobile prison, which found expression in common language. You were confined to a wheelchair. Or wheelchair-bound.

It took Rick Hansen and his round-the-world trek to show a wheelchair was a noun and not a sentence.

Before the world knew of Mr. Hansen, and just at the point where Mr. Fox captured the nation’s imagination for his own cross-Canada run, Mr. Inkster, then aged 39, had to fill in for Mr. Fox as the Cablecars battled for the national crown at the wheelchair basketball championship in Winnipeg.

The Vancouver team won. Their coach called Mr. Inkster the team’s “unsung hero.”

You can say that again.

The Dueck Powerglides of Vancouver were inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame last year. Shown above is the inaugural 1950-51 team. Bill Inkster joined in 1959.

A whale of a research project

George Tzanetakis is developing software that assists researchers in understanding orca sounds. Geoff Howe photograph.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 16, 2010

VICTORIA

Two Vancouver Island researchers eavesdrop on orcas.

For more than four decades, Paul Spong and Helena Symonds have recorded whales passing by their OrcaLab research station on Hanson Island, off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.

They gathered boxes filled with high-quality analog audio cassettes.

The tapes are filled with magnificent whale sounds — pulsed calls, tonal whistles, echolocation clicks.

Less interesting are the untold hours of background noise and hydrophone hissing.

The tapes run for more than 20,000 hours. That’s two years and three months of around-the-clock listening.

It would take nearly seven years to listen to the orca conversations as part of a daily job, not including lunch or coffee breaks.

Then, the sounds would have to be registered, cross-referenced, and annotated. It would be a painstaking task should anyone ever be foolish to attempt it.

Too much data?

Call in a computer scientist.

“It’s a huge amount of audio,” said George Tzanetakis of the University of Victoria. “It’s impossible for a human to process, even if you had an army of volunteers.”

For the past four years, the professor has been transferring the sounds recorded on analog tapes into digital signals. He is about halfway through the batch.

That’s just the first step.

Now that the sounds can be heard online by researchers (and other curious cetacean sympathizers), the next step has been to develop software capable of identifying patterns.

Think of it as the development of a search engine, based on phonetic units, or “small melodic fragments,” instead of proper nouns.

He is also working on filtering unwanted sounds, so the whales’ clicks and squeals are clearer.

The creation of a large file of searchable whale conversations makes more possible the chance we might one day be able to say, “Parlez-vous orca? Sprechen sie orca? Habla orca?”

This aural archive of orca sounds is known as the orchive.

Mr. Tzanetakis, 34, retains his wonder for the noises made by ocean creatures who navigate and communicate by sound.

“There’s something very haunting about it,” he said.

He reminds himself not to read too much into the sounds he hears.

“They may be having quite a mundane conversation. We don’t know.”

He will say this after hearing a gabfest among one resident pod.

“They’re top-of-the-(food)-chain animals. Their only possible enemy is us. They’re quite confident. They can be quite loud in conversation, because they don’t care who’s listening.”

He has become sensitive to the assault of noise which the whales endure from boats and aircraft.

“It must be like living inside a construction zone all your life. That must be quite annoying.”

The professor has a background in music, not marine biology.

He was born in Grenoble, France, where his father was working on his doctorate. His parents, both Greek nationals, were physics students, finding it opportune to be away from their homeland while it fell under control of a military dictatorship. George was born the year after the fall of the junta.

The family returned to Greece, settling in the Heraklion on Crete. The boy played piano, but chaffed at the discipline of practice, preferring instead to improvise. This led to the happy suggestion he join the junior high marching band, for which he was handed a saxophone with the instruction to teach himself. He became a jazz fan.

University studies in computer science, and more formal training in the sax, eventually led him at Princeton University, where he earned doctorate in computer science. His research focuses on music information retrieval.

He has designed software to scan signals to track the beat and determine the genre of the music.

Mr. Tzanetakis (zanna-TACK-iss) also performs with LaSaM, an eclectic ensemble of composers and performers. Their speciality is creative improvisation. (The playful band name is an acronym for Luminosity and Sounds by Adventurous Musicians.)

The work on orca acoustics will also help in culling helpful sounds from the constant hydrophone recordings made by the VENUS and NEPTUNE networks of underwater observatories.

He does not know whether we will ever understand orca language. Imagine being dropped in a land in which you do not know the language, or even the structure of the language, and you cannot ask anyone what anything means, or the context in which it is said. Good luck.

Because orcas are intelligent, their conversation while eating may not be about eating.

He has noted one similarity to human behaviour.

Young orcas use fewer calls than adults, but do so more often.

“Like when children use a word again and again and again,” he said. “They have a smaller vocabulary.”

His help in deciphering the tapes is all the more remarkable for two facts.

The taping began five years before he was born.

Before joining the project, he knew little about orcas.

“I saw ‘Free Willy.’ That was the extent of my knowledge.”

He has since visited the OrcaLab on Hanson Island, but it was at a time of the year when the resident pods were not in the area.

The closet the computer scientist has come to communing with whales, other than listening in on their conversations, came when he joined tourists on a whale-watching tour.

Dick Starrak, hockey player (1927-2010)

Dick Starrak and the 1947-48 Michigan Wolverines won the inaugural American collegiate championship.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 4, 2010

Dick Starrak, a recruit from Moose Jaw, Sask., helped the University of Michigan capture the inaugural American collegiate hockey championship in 1948.

The Wolverines won the title with victories over Harvard and Colorado before knocking off Dartmouth 8-4 in a tournament played at Colorado Springs, Colo.

Mr. Starrak joined Michigan for the 1946-47 season as a defenceman. He also played on a forward line with centre Gordie McMillan and winger Lyle Phillips. The trio all hailed from Moose Jaw, where Mr. Starrak had played for the juvenile Monarchs.

Michigan failed to repeat as champions the following season. In a tournament game against Dartmouth, the normally law-abiding Mr. Starrak received five minor penalties, a record that stood for 39 years. He had been charged with but two penalties in the previous 23 games. Michigan lost, 4-2.

His brother, Jim Starrak, also a defenceman, won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship with the Colorado College Tigers in 1950. The brothers were both named All Americans for the 1948-49 season.

After graduation, Dick Starrak skated for the Windsor (Ont.) Ryancretes and Detroit Auto Club of the professional International Hockey League.

Away from the rink, he worked in the lumber industry, starting with the Capilano Timber Company of Vancouver. He later moved to New England to work for a wholesale lumber company, eventually becoming president of the George McQuesten Lumber Company of Massachusetts.

Richard Bonar Starrak was born on May 26, 1927, at Moose Jaw, Sask. He died on Feb. 6 at Hanover, N.H. He was 82. He leaves his wife, Jacquelynne; a step-daughter; a son; and four daughters.

Recalling the Human Fish

Charles Zimmy smokes a cigar as he floats on his back during his epic conquest of the Hudson River in 1937. BELOW: Zimmy as featured in a 1986 Ripley's "Believe It Or Not!" cartoon and in a 1931 photograph in the Toronto Star.

By Tom Hawthorn
WashingtonPost.com
March 12, 2010

Howard Kessler, who died earlier this year, was a reporter in Oregon and California. He gave up the trade soon after the failure of his Mill City Log in an Oregon mill town. He then worked for the California Farm Bureau and later became a bookseller.

In 1934, he interrupted his studies at the University of Oregon to travel through Morocco and Western Europe. He filed dispatches to his hometown newspaper, the Lethbridge Herald, in Alberta, Canada. (His father hailed from a family of barrel manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio. They settled on the Canadian Prairie near a hamlet named New Dayton after their old home.) On his overseas expedition, Kessler interviewed the tennis great Bill Tilden over a roast beef dinner at The Savoy in London.

In his career, he also had interviews with a handful of Hollywood stars, including Shirley Temple and Groucho Marx.

Of all the famous personages he met, the one with whom he was most impressed was Charles Zimmy. He had first read the name in a Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not!” cartoon.

As a boy, Charles Zibelman had fallen beneath a streetcar in Chicago, losing both legs below the hip. Zimmy later taught himself to golf and to drive a car with special mechanisms, but his claim to fame came as a marathon swimmer.


Kessler wrote that he found his conversation with Zimmy in a Spanish cabaret so engrossing that he nearly failed to notice the gyrations of the nearby cabaret dancers.

The swimmer made appearances on the carnival circuit as The Legless Wonder and The Human Fish. He tried to conquer the Catalina Channel, but failed, and had to abandon an attempt to cross the English Channel in 1933 after being stung by a jellyfish.

Despite those disappointments, the determination of the legless man caught the public imagination.

Zimmy claimed the record for continuous swimming by completing 100 consecutive hours — four days and four hours, plus 15 seconds, just to be sure — in a swimming pool in Hawaii.

In 1937, he splashed into the Hudson River from off the end of a dock at Albany, heading south to New York. He battled river tides, twice needing to pass Saugerties after he was carried back upstream.

Zimmy liked to amuse those who came to cheer him on by smoking a cigar as he swam on his back.

Newspapers covered his daily progress in breathless prose.

After six days in the chilly waters, his torso slathered in grease to retain heat, he called it quits at the 129th Street ferry dock in Manhattan.


He boldly suggested his next attempt would be to swim from Key West to Havana.

The newspaper coverage of Zimmy’s exploits seems to evaporate after 1937, his fate a mystery. He simply disappears from the printed record.

Meanwhile, the daily Ripley’s feature continues to this day. In 1986, the cartoon published in the Lethbridge Herald, the same newspaper in which Kessler wrote a long feature about his encounter with The Human Fish, included this item:

“Charles (‘Zimmy’) Zibelman, who lost both his legs when he was nine, in 1937, at the age of 44, swam 145 miles down the Hudson River from Albany to N.Y. City, remaining in the water for 148 consecutive hours.” Believe it or not.

A pilgrimage to honour baseball's greatest — and it's not who you think

Martin Dihigo Jr. (left) and Kit Krieger discuss baseball at the gravesite of Dihigo's father in the cemetery at Cruces, Cuba. CENTRE: Martin Dihigo was known as The Maestro and the Immortal. BELOW: Every year, Krieger leaves a baseball signed by his tour group on Martin Dihigo's grave.

By Tom Hawthorn

The Tyee
March 12, 2010

CRUCES, Cuba

The museum in this town has on display leg irons and shackles used to imprison slaves who worked on the surrounding sugar-cane fields in colonial days.

Another room, facing onto the town square, presents happier artifacts expressing freedom in a land in which such a quality has always been in short supply — a passport, a leather glove, a photograph of a young son on the knee of a father wearing baseball flannels.

The boy is aged 67 now, his pear-shaped physique barely hinting at the professional athlete he had been. To Martin Dihigo Jr. has fallen the responsibility for bearing witness to his father’s athletic greatness.

The Dihigo name (pronounced DEE-go) remains revered in Cuba, where the father, once known as El Maestro, is remembered as The Immortal. His bust can be found beneath the grandstand at the Estadio Latinoamericano in Havana. Many baseball historians regard the elder Dihigo as the most versatile athlete ever to take the field, capable of playing the infield as well as the outfield, even while being highly regarded as a pitcher.

He was a demon on the mound and a terror at the plate.


A group of 25 baseball fans from the north, led by Kit Krieger of Vancouver's Cubaball Tours, made a detour to Cruces to honour the Immortal’s memory and to pay homage to his legacy. Eleven of the tourists hailed from British Columbia, counting among themselves a tax lawyer, a publicist, a journalist, a cartoonist, a travel agent, a corporate headhunter, a stay-at-home dad, two retired teachers, and a provincial court judge.

The northerners were English-speaking whites from a wealthy land come to pay homage to the son of a black-skinned, Spanish-speaking man denied the opportunity to ply his trade in baseball’s major leagues owing to the colour of his skin.
The touring group crowded into the museum room.

“We’re all members of the same family,” Dihigo assured the visitors. “The baseball family.”

The senior Dihigo has been called “the black Babe Ruth,” though the record suggests Ruth be described as the “white Martin Dihigo.” In 24 stellar seasons, the Immortal hit for power and average, winning twice as many games as a pitcher as he lost. He retired in 1947, the year in which Jackie Robinson at long last breached the colour barrier. Had Dihigo not been barred from the majors, he would have been as celebrated as Ruth, with whom he shares the honour of having been inducted into the famed Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. Dihigo has also been enshrined in the Cuban, Mexican, and Venezuelan halls of fame.

His reputation in Cuba is all the greater for his brave opposition to two tyrannical presidents. The ball player opposed the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in the 1930s. In 1953, by which time he had become a prominent sports writer and announcer, he left Cuba vowing not to return until Fulgencio Batista was overthrown. While living in self-imposed exile in Mexico, it is said he donated money to Fidel Castro's movement after Che Guevara made a personal plea for funds.

After the 1959 revolution, he returned to his homeland ever more a hero. That he never broke with Fidel Castro means the regime has a continuing interest in promoting his legacy.

Dihigo died at Cienfuegos in 1971, five days before what would have been his 65th birthday. The death received scant notice in the United States. In Mexico, every baseball park held a minute of silence in his honour. In Cuba, his passing was mourned throughout the land and his achievements were lauded in public ceremonies.

His namesake son tried to follow in his cleats. Marty Dihigo, as he was styled by sportswriters, never came close to his father’s brilliance. His greatest performance came in smacking seven consecutive base hits with the minor-league Geneva (N.Y.) Redlegs in 1959. When playing for teams in Palatka, Fla., and Macon, Ga., he sometimes had to stay in his car while teammates ate in whites-only diners. He returned to his homeland and his father’s shadow.

“It is really difficult to have the same name as Martin Dihigo and to play baseball,” the son once told me. “Everyone thought that because we had the same name I had to be as good as he was and I had to do what he could do.

“On the other hand, it has always been beautiful to have this homage and tribute, and it is the result of carrying his name.”

It was time to go to the cemetery. Just beyond a large memorial to the local “martyrs of the revolution,” the Dihigo grave is covered by a concrete bed on which rests an opened book, also in concrete, on which can be read, spilling across both pages, the inscription: "Recuerdo al inmortal Martin Dihigo Llano, 1906-1971.”

As he does on every annual visit, Krieger placed on the grave a baseball signed by each member of the tour group.

The visitors brought a sack of baseballs for local children. Dihigo received as a gift a package of dried B.C. salmon. He had a request for next year’s visit. He would like a pair of athletic shoes, perhaps Nike, size 10 1/2, the supply of such limited on the island.

The Dihigo pilgrimage is a reminder that an athlete’s glory lingers long after their departure.