For most cities, this might be a decade’s worth of inductees into their Sports Halls of Fame. In Victoria, they call it just another year.
A standout group was enshrined in the Victoria Sports Hall of Fame when the sold-out induction ceremonies for the Class of 2016 were held Saturday evening at the Westin Bear Mountain. The Victoria Sports Hall of Fame was established in 1991 and this was the 25th induction ceremony.
The Class of 2016 included athletes who competed in a combined eight Olympic Games, winning three medals; coaches who guided Island athletes to a total of eight Olympic medals; and builders who left lasting legacies. Plaques honouring the Class of 2016 will join those of the 204 previous inductees that hang on the concourse walls of Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. Here is a look at the Victoria Sports Hall of Fame induction Class of 2016.
Simon Whitfield
(Athlete, Triathlon)
On a glorious September morning in 2000, Simon Whitfield ran through the shadow of the Sydney Opera House and into Canadian sporting consciousness.
“Simon Says Gold,” screamed the front-page headline in the Times Colonist the next day.
So, who was this pale, thin and unassuming Canadian who had so suddenly been thrust forward?
Few had even heard of the man or his sport, as triathlon made its Olympic debut with Whitfield winning the first Summer Games medal awarded in the sport. But everybody knew about him after that morning in Sydney.
For the next decade, Whitfield was the Canadian triathlon franchise, following up his from-the-blue Olympic gold medal at Sydney 2000 with gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and a stubborn late-career silver-medal performance at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing that was as gritty and inspired as it was pulsating to the finish line.
A rare four-time Olympian, Whitfield was the Canadian flagbearer during the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Summer Olympics.
Raised in Kingston, Ont., Whitfield went to high school in his dad’s native Australia to follow his sporting dreams in a country that appreciates sportsmen, before truly finding his dreams in a big way after relocating to live and train in Victoria in 1997. It would be a marriage of time, place and person that would go down in sporting history as this adopted son is now in both the Victoria and British Columbia sports hall of fame. That he is also headed to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame is a foregone conclusion.
Kent Manderville
(Athlete, Ice Hockey)
Former NHL forward Kent Manderville became a rare Winter Olympian out of the Island when he won the silver medal with Canada at the 1992 Albertville Games, to go along with his two gold medals from the 1990 and 1991 world junior hockey championships.
The Racquet Club of Victoria product was drafted 24th overall by the Calgary Flames in the 1989 NHL draft out of Cornell University of the NCAA and played 646 regular-season games in the Show from 1991-92 to 2002-03 with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Carolina Hurricanes, Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins. The six-foot-three role forward scored 37 goals and recorded 67 assists for 104 NHL points and 348 penalty minutes.
Manderville moved to Victoria from Edmonton at age nine and is one of the most under-rated hockey players to come out of the Island. His driving, grinding, honest, two-way game helped the Maple Leafs reach the Western Conference final in consecutive years — yes, the Leafs did that — losing to Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings in 1993, and Trevor Linden and the Vancouver Canucks in 1994.
During one of those runs with the Leafs, the tenacious Manderville was shown on the Leafs bench sporting badger-like black bruises around both eyes. That said it all about Manderville’s willingness to go into the hard places on the ice.
After playing in Europe, Manderville attended the University of Ottawa law school and has worked as a TV analyst for Senators games and also dabbled in coaching.
Unheralded no more, Manderville took his well-earned place Saturday night in his hometown sports hall of fame.
Simon Keith
(Athlete, Soccer)
To live on the Island in the 1980s was to live the Simon Keith story. You couldn’t escape it as it became news from the sports page to the front page when the rising young soccer star was struck down by a virus almost in mid-stride during his University of Victoria Vikes career. It attacked his heart, and suddenly this young man, who seemed to have so much promise and life ahead of him, needed a new heart just to continue living.
The talented and flash-quick Keith, from Mount Douglas Secondary, was almost certainly headed to play pro soccer and internationally for Canada — maybe even as a teen for Canada at the 1986 World Cup. All that was gone in a flash. He needed a new heart, and time was quickly running out.
But Keith, after a life-saving heart transplant, became one of the rare athletes to play pro sports with a new heart. The story made headlines around the world and was portrayed last year in a segment titled Change of Heart on ESPN’s E:60 show.
Keith recently met the family of the young man who died, ironically while playing soccer on a field in Wales, and whose heart now beats in Keith’s body. The meeting was emotionally searing, and affected both Keith and the donor family deeply.
“I always looked ahead and not in the rear view mirror,” said Keith, who now heads a foundation that advocates and raises awareness for transplant issues.
Saturday provided another moment of reflection as Keith’s wife, two daughters, son and parents were with him for his induction.
Keith remained in Las Vegas with a business career after playing NCAA soccer there, but he never forgets the hometown that made him.
“The sporting environment in Victoria is unmatched and burned into my DNA,” he said.
“It laid the ground work for everything that followed.”
Nancy Mollenhauer
(Athlete, Field Hockey)
Field-hockey great Nancy Mollenhauer out of Oak Bay High School won national championships at the University of Victoria and played in the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Mollenhauer was coached at UVic and with the Canadian national team by Marina Van Der Merwe, who last year was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
“Marina pushed people beyond what they thought they could do,” said Mollenhauer (née Charlton).
“We were such underdogs that we took ourselves by surprise by winning the silver medal in the 1983 World Cup. And we just rode that wave and ran with it and the momentum just built.”
The wave rolled through fifth- and sixth-place finishes, respectively, in the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics and a bronze medal in the 1986 World Cup.
Field hockey became such a happening in Canadian sport that Mollenhauer was chosen the Canadian flag-bearer for the opening ceremonies of the 1987 Pan Am Games at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Mollenhauer, one of the most complete players Canada has produced, thanked her hometown for the foundation that allowed her to reach such heights.
“Victoria is one of the greatest cities for amateur sports in the world,” said Mollenhauer, the longtime athletic co-ordinator for the
middle school at St. Michaels University School.
“That support I’ve had in this city in my athletic career has been terrific. UVic was also instrumental in that support. That’s where it all started building for me. And I had an incredible family backing me, and friends.
“You felt valued as an athlete, and success bred success. That’s why so many great athletes come out of Victoria and also come here [to play and train].”
There was no one key, but a variety of factors, that made this all happen, she said. “I wish I could package it and sell it.
Gerald Kazanowski
(Athlete, Basketball)
So calm, so cool and so utterly unflappable, Gerald Kazanowski became one of the greatest inside players in Canadian basketball history. He patrolled the post as the University of Victoria Vikes dynasty of the 1980s won four Canadian championships, and Canada placed in the top six at the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics.
“It was a time when we had people coming together and wanting to compete at a high level,” Kazanowski said.
“When you are able to bring together great athletes, who are highly motivated, and coaches such as John Levering [at Nanaimo District Secondary], Ken Shields [at UVic] and Jack Donohue [on the Canadian national team], it usually leads to success.”
That it did.
“Our motto at UVic was: ‘You can’t stop a train.’ And that’s what it felt like — that this was a train that kept moving forward and couldn’t be stopped,” said Kazanowski, now an investment adviser in Sidney.
Internationally, the Canadian team, with Kazanowski methodically under the boards, achieved levels of success in the Olympics that were not matched until two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash became Canadian team captain. In 1984 at Los Angeles, Kazanowski and Canada lost to the Michael Jordan-led U.S. in the semifinals before narrowly losing in the bronze-medal game to Yugoslavia.
“Kaz was such a cerebral player with instincts you can’t teach,” said UVic coach Shields, himself a member of the Victoria Sports Hall.
Nash, perhaps fittingly, grew up UVic’s McKinnon Gym and was inspired by watching the likes of Kazanowski and Eli Pasquale lead UVic to greatness.
They weren’t alone, as UVic also produced Olympian success from field hockey to rowing during that epoch that so stirred a young Nash.
“In that 1980s era around UVic, in a number of different sports, you had people wanting to be the best they could be and there were opportunities to do that and that led to an era of great success,” said Kazanowski, who was among the best of them from that golden time.
Mike Spracklen
(Coach, Rowing)
Few coaches in the history of sport have been as driven as, or have driven their athletes harder than, Mike Spracklen. He was single-minded in his pursuit of finding speed on water.
Moving a boat fast is an art combined with the physical brutality of plain sweat and muscle power. Nobody brought those elements together like Spracklen did during a legendary coaching career for Canada on Elk Lake that produced Olympic gold medals in the men’s eight at Barcelona 1992 and Beijing 2008, silver medals in the eight at London 2012 and the four at Athens 2004, and Victorian Silken Laumann’s lauded from-the-brink comeback bronze in single sculls at Barcelona 1992. Spracklen also guided Canadian crews to eight world-championship medals.
“Mike Spracklen lives excellence as much as he preaches it, and he led by example,” said Adam Kreek, a member of Spracklen’s Olympic gold-medallist eight crew from Beijing 2008.
“He demanded more of himself than of his athletes.”
That’s saying a lot, considering, as Kreek said: “Mike demanded an incredible amount of work and commitment from his athletes. He broke athletes down and built them back up. He was a master at that. Mike had an old-school view and methodology. I consider myself lucky to have received what he taught and am grateful to have been coached by him for eight years.”
Nobody brought together the art, science and brute physicality of rowing better than Spracklen.
“Rowing is a simple thing, but how difficult it is to do this simple thing,” Kreek said.
“You can have strong bodies in a boat, but not deliver speed. Mike Spracklen was able to put it all together and create winning boats. He was constantly questioning us, and the biggest question always was: ‘Do you want to win an Olympic gold medal, and do your actions line up with your desires?’ ”
More often than not for Spracklen’s athletes on Elk Lake, the answer was yes.
Randy Bennett
(Coach, Swimming)
Canadian swimming suffered an incalculable loss in 2015 when coach Randy Bennett of Victoria died of cancer at age 51. He guided the development of the high-performance athletes at Saanich Commonwealth Place and was also the Canadian Olympic team head coach.
Bennett’s most famous athlete, Ryan Cochrane of Victoria, won silver and bronze medals in the 1,500-metre freestyle at the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, and numerous medals at the world championships and Commonwealth and Pan Am Games.
Bennett’s legacy lived on at the 2016 Rio Olympics when his Saanich Commonwealth Place athlete Hilary Caldwell won bronze in the women’s 200-metre backstroke. He will forever be with her, as Caldwell wears a tattoo bearing Bennett’s favourite expression: “Make It So.”
“We are obviously going to miss Randy for the rest of our lives,” said Caldwell.
“But we’re [using] all the strength we got from him. We definitely want to make him proud.”
Bennett had a way of imparting knowledge that left a lasting impact on his swimmers. His relationship with Cochrane went deeper than coach-athlete and was almost symbiotic.
“It’s so bittersweet to be celebrating Randy’s great accomplishments as a leader in sport. On the one hand, he deserves all of these accolades and more, but he is unable to share in this experience and feel the gratitude we wish we could all give him,” said Cochrane, about Bennett’s induction into the Victoria Sports Hall of Fame.
“He was an absolute leader, and championed change for the better whenever he got a chance, and he was a positive influencer to an extremely vast amount of young people throughout the country. He is missed on a daily basis.”
Bennett’s sons, Kyle and Brett, accepted the posthumous induction Saturday night on behalf of their father.
Bob Moffatt
(Builder, Tennis)
If you haven’t noticed, tennis is a happening sport in Canada. But it didn’t occur overnight. The foundation for the current success was, in many ways, laid by former Tennis Canada president and CEO Bob Moffatt, who came out of the old Victoria Lawn Tennis Club in Oak Bay, seemingly with racquet forged to hand.
Because of it, tennis is riding high in Canada. The Rogers Cup, and the stadia in which the games are played, have a lineage back to Moffatt’s 16-year tenure at Tennis Canada.
“Tennis in Canada faced big challenges in the 1990s and early 2000s,” Moffatt said.
The sport met every one of those head-on with Moffatt at the helm in Toronto. But he never forgot where he came from.
“Victoria, which is such a cauldron of sporting excellence, was always my inspiration,” said Moffatt, also a coach and former executive director of Tennis B.C., and who returned to Victoria after retiring from Tennis Canada to run the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence for its first three years.
“This is where I was born and raised, and this is a great way to finish and to be honoured by your hometown,” he said of his induction to the Victoria Sports Hall.
Many of the current leaders in Canadian sports — PISE CEO Robert Bettauer, Canadian Sport Institute-Pacific CEO Wendy Pattenden, former PISE CEO Roger Skillings, and sport marketing guru and commentator Tom Mayenknecht — came from tennis backgrounds and were mentored by Moffatt.
“Bob was a great leader, and the proof is in who he influenced,” Bettauer said.
“He not only brought a business mindset, professionalism and structure to Tennis Canada, he helped develop so many of us who are now in key leadership roles in Canadian sport. That’s a real legacy.”
John and Marilyn Bate
(Builders, All-Round)
When the old Memorial Arena was finally decommissioned, the centre face-off circle on the floor was cut out and given to John Bate.
So in a sense, the very heart of the old arena still beats and is in Bate’s safekeeping.
It couldn’t be in a more appropriate place.
Bate’s long-term commitment to local sports over the years, especially during the old Memorial Arena era, was legendary during his career as both the assistant manager and manager of the original Barn on Blanshard, as it was affectionately known.
And always at his side helping out — through all the Cougars hockey and Shamrocks lacrosse seasons and the Brier curling and Skate Canada championships — was his wife Marilyn Bate.
Everybody who came through the old barn received the gracious Bate treatment. John and Marilyn were later integral in the establishment of the Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. It is only fitting that they enter it — and together.
“We’re very honoured, especially when you see all the great names on the walls of the [Save-on-Foods] Memorial Centre, and realize the quality of people who have been inducted before us,” John Bate said.
