Former radio and TV sports anchor and commentator John McKeachie has covered it all, from the Summer and Winter Olympics, to the B.C. Lions and the NHL.
Yet it all comes back to a humble baseball park wedged tight between Hillside and Cook streets. McKeachie is among several alumni returning today to celebrate the 70th anniversary of National Little League, which opened the same halcyon spring in which a young Queen was crowned and Mount Everest summited for the first time.
Also at the park this afternoon will be former New York Yankees prospect George Hemming. McKeachie and Hemming were nine-year-olds when they stepped to the plate on the first day the diamond opened in 1953. McKeachie remembers like it was yesterday.
“It was a dirt field because grass wasn’t put in until 1954,” he said.
“I still remember putting on my Oddfellows jersey for the first time at my house before the first game at the park and thinking it was a biggest deal happening.”
From moments like that are lifelong passions ingrained.
“My love of sports was fuelled from there,” said McKeachie, who went on to play basketball for the University of Victoria Vikings.
What made those days even more special for McKeachie was that his dad was a coach at the park.
All-rounder Ian McKeachie was a part of the Victoria Blue Ribbons and Dominoes basketball dynasty of the 1930s and 1940s, which won five Canadian senior men’s championships, and produced Olympic silver medallists Doug Peden, and Art and Chuck Chapman.
The original National Little League teams were Oddfellows, Gyros, North Kiwanis and Rotary. Also suiting up for Oddfellows was Hemming, who would go on to be signed by New York and make it to Double-A in the Yankees system through such exotic locales as Harlan, Kentucky, and Shelby, North Carolina.
“If they had Tommy John surgery back then, George would have made it to the major leagues,” said McKeachie, a Class of 2012 Victoria Sports Hall of Fame inductee in the media category.
Also a National original was Bob Holness, who went on to become the greatest Canadian softball shortstop of his era, and won national and world championships and Pan Am Games gold as part of the Victoria Bates dynasty. Barry Sadler, who went on to make a name in basketball and soccer, was another park original. Another 8-9 player on opening day at National Little League was Eric Newell, who was so small he immediately was tagged with the nickname “Earwig,” which later became “Wiggy.” Newell went on to become chairman and CEO of Syncrude and chancellor of the University of Alberta.
Hitting the first run in park history was the late Barry Harvey.
The park had an immediate impact. The original 11-12-year-olds that opening year, with star pitcher Steve Bishop, led National to the Canadian final and came within one pitch in a 1-0 loss of reaching the 1953 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
The little park never got close again as Esquimalt-Vic West in 1974 and Gordon Head in 1999, led by future major-leaguer Michael Saunders, are the only teams from the Island to win nationals and play in the Little League World Series.
A four-decade umpiring fixture from the National park, however, made it twice to Williamsport as the late Doug Hudin became the first Canadian to umpire the Little League World Series. That was quite a breakthrough for Canada, which has still never had a team win the Little League World Series. A plaque honouring Hudlin has been installed at National Little League with efforts ongoing to rename an adjacent street Doug Hudlin Memorial Way on an honorary basis.
“This park means a lot to this multi-cultural neighbourhood,” said Barb Hudlin, Doug’s niece, and a board member of National Little League.
“There are so many parents from the neighbourhood happy that it’s here.”
A driving force behind the park as coach, manager and umpire for the last 47 years, Don Moore, now coaches his grandson at the park.
Today’s reunion stretches back even further. Hudlin said it will be a unique and full-circle moment when alumni from that first 8-9 rookie tournament 70 years ago hand out the trophies today during the latest edition of the 8-9 rookie tournament, now known as the Doug Hudlin Charitable Society Tournament.
“It will also be a meaningful moment for the alumni,” said McKeachie.
cdheensaw@timescolonist.com
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