by Rob Simpson
No Heavy Lifting
Globetrotting Adventures of a Sports Media Guy
Rob Simpson
CONTENTS
Preface
Foreword
Monty
Leaps and Bounds
The Growling
The Gambler
Back Spasms
The Peewee Press
Big Z on the Mountain (Part 1)
Big Z on the Mountain (Part 2)
The Italian Job
Dumbass Haole Boy (Part 1)
Dumbass Haole Boy (Part 2)
College Klepto
The Forbidden Isle
The Swamp
The Hostage
Flights
The Ice-Level Man Cometh (and Goeth)
About the Author
Copyright
To Pete Bowers and Ric Blackwell
— broadcasting legends in my world
PREFACE
This is not “I was born a tall white child . . .” I’m not famous, so I do not warrant a memoir. These are individual episodes — the wired, wacky, weird, and wonderful — related to working as a broadcaster around the world.
A couple of notes: for my Yankee friends, it’s written with Canadian English; for example, labor and honor read as labour and honour. For my Canuck friends, and some Yanks, there is plenty of behind-the-scenes NHL insight and intrigue going on.
One other thing: kind of weird for a book made of paper, where you can’t clip and paste, but I’ve added a YouTube link at the bottom of many chapters. Just type the provided title in the YouTube search bar and you’ll see a cool short video directly related to the material or a brief video version of the material itself.
I’m putting my thank-yous here. Thank you, John Shannon, for the support over the years, the kind words, and for writing the foreword even though I don’t think you’ve seen the non-hockey chapters. Pete Bowers started me down this road in high school; Ric Blackwell made sure I stayed on it. Thank you to the late Bill Kreifeldt (1941–2016), who gave a trio of teenage reporters their first NBA media credentials. Thank you Ernie Harwell and Bruce Martyn for providing inspiration.
Thank you, Michael Holmes, David Caron, Jack David, editor Laura Pastore, and the entire hard-working posse at ECW. Thank you to dear friend and independent editor Karen Milner.
This isn’t about me. It’s about the stories. I hope you enjoy it.
— Simmer
FOREWORD
By John Shannon
I have often been quoted as saying that hockey succeeds in spite of itself. Its greatest attribute isn’t the speed or athletic ability required to play the game. Nor is it the sounds of the game or its physical nature. Hockey succeeds because of the people in and around the game and the stories they tell.
This book is a great example of that.
I first heard of Rob Simpson as the play-by-play voice of the Boardwalk Bullies of the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL). They were a short-lived franchise that won the league championship only to disappear almost as quickly as they appeared. The team could only wish to have the same shelf life and passion for hockey as Rob Simpson. You see, Simpson isn’t that run-of-the-mill guy who works on the fringes of the game (like the rest of us in the media). He is a passionate survivor. He sees things in the game that many do not. He is able to dissect why people play this great game at any level, from peewee to pro, from Chattanooga to China. He sees and respects the game at any and every level.
Over the last two decades, I have hired Rob for at least three jobs. It was never boring with him around. Make no mistake about it, Rob can be a pain in the ass. He is relentless in his pursuit of what makes hockey so important to so many people. He believes in the game so much that he expects others to believe in and understand it as well. It is a blessing and a curse.
What is endearing about Rob is his ability to find a story in the minutiae of sport or, rather, those people in sport. And as you will read, his love of competition and athletes goes beyond hockey: he has an innate ability to look beyond the competition to find the humorous, the eccentric, even the emotional side to a competitor’s story. That’s what makes Rob what he is: an excellent storyteller.
With that in mind, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. And know that Rob Simpson makes every journey well worth the time.
MONTY
“Running with the children the other morning . . . I’ll be touched and remember forever.”
Steve Montador, a few days after visiting
a school in the Serengeti, June 2007
Steve Montador took a lot of punches. He wasn’t the most successful hockey fighter, but he was always a willing participant. Willing to stick up for any teammate; willing to drop the mitts at the appropriate time. He would best be considered a middleweight who often fought heavyweight enforcers. He fought stars, shit disturbers, and grinders. According to hockeyfights.com, in his career, “Monty” fought fifty-one different NHLers, nine of them multiple times, and, based on the visual evidence, lost the majority of his fights.
But whether he won or lost at fisticuffs meant little. A hard-working defenceman, he played the game the right way and was cherished by any man wearing the same sweater.
He was also freaking hilarious.
The longest, hardest sustained laughter I have experienced as an adult occurred while listening to Montador tell a story about laser hair removal in a sensitive area of his body and the interactions with the middle-aged woman who was removing it. We were sitting at a remote resort restaurant on the shores of the Indian Ocean, north of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, eating dinner with Andrew Ference, his former teammate in Calgary and at the time a Boston Bruins defenceman; as well as Mark Brender, then Canadian Deputy Director of the humanitarian sports organization Right To Play; Patrick Gamere, our videographer from New England Sports Network (NESN); and our local cab driver, whom we invited to sit and join us despite the fact he spoke only Swahili.
The cabbie didn’t need to speak English to know that Monty’s story was outrageously funny. Simply watching Monty’s gestures and the rest of us doubled over, the cabbie was laughing, eyes watering, as hard as the rest of us.
It was one of the many times the man had us in stitches during a trip that had its fair share of very serious moments. Like when the machine gun–toting Tanzanian cop decided whether or not he was going to let our van pass through his checkpoint; when we almost stepped on not one but two very deadly eastern green mamba snakes in the Serengeti; when some remote villagers may have taken exception to us not buying any of their handmade goods after welcoming us like kings; and when we regularly realized just how amazing the local children were, despite the fact they were dealing with crushing poverty, AIDS, and abuse.
Monty was there on a mission with Ference to learn first-hand about the work of Right To Play in East Africa and to pass that knowledge and experience along to potential supporters back home. I was helping that effort by producing and hosting an hour-long documentary on their almost week-long adventure for NHL Network TV and also a couple of half-hour versions for NESN.
They were long days full of smiles, enlightenment, and inspiration while playing games with Tanzanian children, followed by deeper reflection on a nightly basis. The reality of the kids’ living conditions and lifestyle was humbling and confounding.
Montador had committed to the trip just a week before it began, after another NHL hockey player, Georges Laraque, then of the Penguins, backed out due to a summer training injury. On day two, Andrew described his appreciation of Monty’s effort.
“It’s pretty cool tha
t a guy can come on a big trip to Africa with six days’ notice. There aren’t too many guys around who would do that but . . . let alone come with the enthusiasm and understanding about what Right To Play is all about. He really is just opening his arms to what we’re seeing here, and the culture here, and what we’re all about.”
Right To Play uses games and sports in places like sub-Saharan Africa to teach kids life lessons they normally wouldn’t be exposed to. Not only do children show up to school in greater numbers during these RTP activity days, so do more teachers. Among other things, the activities teach the kids about avoiding malaria, protecting themselves against HIV, and treating others, especially girls and women in this otherwise very patriarchal landscape, with respect.
Ference and Montador flew overnight from London to Dar es Salaam, met us at the Peacock Hotel City Centre, and within an hour were in a van heading to the first venue, an orphanage, or dogo dogo (“little” in Swahili), somewhere in the middle of the city. We had no idea where we were going; we relied on a full-time Tanzanian guide named Leila Sheik, hired by the local Right To Play office, to get us everywhere.
She got us past the cops, made sure our meals and hotel rooms were taken care of, negotiated with villagers, and basically saved our asses whenever we were clueless or potentially in trouble. (I was happy to see Leila pop up on Twitter in June 2015. After our trip in 2007, we thought there was a strong possibility she might get killed. She was a pretty mouthy anti-government activist, who at one point told a hotel manager to go F himself.)
Leila referred to Andrew and Steve, these athlete ambassadors, as her stars — “Whatever my stars want, my stars get.”
On day one, Leila’s stars got a dose of reality. The dogo dogo was a part-time school, part-time recreation centre, and full-time housing facility, teeming with abused kids and AIDS orphans. The country has millions of them. Half of the population lives below the poverty line; most adults earn the equivalent of about US$200 a year.
Issac, literally the first kid we met, was wearing a white t-shirt that had a photograph printed on the front of Steve Yzerman hoisting the Stanley Cup after the Detroit Red Wings won it in 1997. Isaac didn’t know Steve Yzerman’s name, nor would he know Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe. He wouldn’t know a hockey puck if it hit him in the head. He had no idea what the shirt meant; it was just a nifty article of clothing from America.
I’m thinking: pretty freaking cool, this kid is wearing a Red Wings t-shirt. Even more freaking cool was that a donation dropped in a box somewhere in North America reached its intended target, a kid in Africa who needed clothes.
The children held our hands and guided us through a shantytown to a clearing they used as a soccer field. It was a mix of grass and dirt and littered with old tires, which the kids used in inventive ways as toys. The soccer ball was made up of torn pieces of t-shirt sewn tightly around a couple more balled up shirts. Andrew and Monty watched the informal match, played with the children who weren’t involved with the soccer game, and listened to them sing. They hugged the kids, they high-fived, they ran around and laughed.
“You go in and you kind of get their bio: they’re orphaned by AIDS, running away from abusive families, they’re young kids with only other orphans as family,” explained Ference. “So if you kind of go in with that and guess what you’re going to run into, you’d think, ah, kids fallen on hard times. But what we ran into were sharp kids . . . studying during their vacation time . . . really doing whatever they could to better themselves with whatever available resources they had.”
“Another thing that is remarkable is the fact that a lot of them come from impoverished areas and very challenging circumstances,” added Montador, “and yet they have hope in their eyes and they’re happy and they’re enjoying themselves with the things that they do. Their feet are so tough to be running on uneven grass mixed with dirt fields, kicking soccer balls, bumping into each other and getting up with a scrape and just continuing on. I mean, they’re tough.”
That afternoon we went to another dogo dogo, this one on the northern outskirts of the city. A group of eight eighteen-year-old orphan boys in their final year in the program (as the director stated, “they will leave to decide their own fates”) put on a musical performance for us. High-energy interpretive dance and singing accompanied drumming on eight drums the teenagers had made themselves from wood and animal hides. The music included anti-war and anti-genocide messages and also focused on the natural beauty of their country. Aside from the artistic element, there was a practical side to the effort. They sold each drum for the equivalent of eight U.S. dollars.
“That’s another thing that these schools do in such a great way,” Monty said. “There are songs and dances that talk about being free and staying resilient through war and tough times.”
It was the first day of a week dominated by smiles. Genuine, beaming African smiles that made us smile so hard we’d start to laugh. They were smiles as sincere as you’ll see your entire life: at primary schools in remote villages, during our travels deep in the Serengeti, and while meeting a family in their compound literally in the middle of nowhere.
“Their lives are filled with, compared to North American kids, a lot of hardships,” Andrew pointed out. “You would never guess that by their attitudes. They’re the first ones to run out in the street and wave to the mzungu (white skin) and hold your hand. Just very affectionate and happy and real — nothing pretentious about it.”
By day two, our eyes and minds had adjusted to our surroundings. The utter novelty wore off and we gradually acclimated to the social environment and the mission. Monty, the late addition, was all in — a chance to play more games and a chance to shake his booty.
“Music and dance are a part of this culture like no other culture that I’ve been around, and it’s nice because I can dance around with these kids, and though I know I suck, it doesn’t matter,” Monty said between laughs on day two. “Because it’s just having a good time and shaking your hips and expressing yourself that way. Music and dance are just such a great expression of the culture here, and it’s awesome to see 100 or 200 kids dancing and singing in unison. It’s just quite remarkable.”
“Monty took to the trip so naturally, and the kids took to him,” Brender remembers. “He and Andrew both looked kids in the eye and stayed with them, they were there every moment. One girl at a school held Monty’s hand almost from the time he got out of the van until the moment we left. She was maybe twelve or thirteen, and shy, but she wouldn’t leave him. He went with it, happily. Nothing fazed him; he just connected.”
At one point, the NHLers were playing soccer on rival teams with kids from two orphanages. Ference’s squad won the game on penalty kicks, with Andrew scoring the game winner. He was mobbed by hundreds of children who screamed, jumped up and down, and happily chased him the length of the field.
“It was the biggest goal of my career,” Andrew said later while seated next to Montador, rubbing it in. Monty described how his team had taken a dagger to their hearts and how the game was under protest because it wasn’t FIFA sanctioned.
Laughter and smiles were, in contrast, always followed by serious contemplation during our daily debriefs.
“How many kids did we high-five today that were HIV positive?” Ference asked, then guessed probably a third of them, maybe half.
“It’s just a matter-of-fact thing that people get sick here and children, more often than in other places, have to deal with it and have to bear the brunt of it, sometimes taking over the head of the family at ten years old,” stated Montador before drawing a deep breath. “It’s just amazing to see how tough they are and to see how they want to enjoy life . . . and they have to deal with situations like this.” Monty pursed his lips and seemed to fight back emotion. Our cameraman noticed.
“The most impressive thing I came away with about Steve was that he was so genuine,” remembers Gamere. “Just a re
gular guy who was really appreciative of where he was in life. He was so natural with the kids and able to be cool while also not taking himself so seriously. When we interviewed him by the lake and he got emotional, it really showed me a lot about who he was and that he really had an understanding for what brought him there.”
Steve Montador in Tanzania, 2007.
The lake was Lake Victoria, ruggedly breathtaking and windswept. To start the middle portion of the week, we flew to the city of Mwanza on the lake’s southern shore (find and watch the documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare for a look at life there and a reality check) and stayed at the Hotel Tilapia. It was our stopover before a morning flight on a single-propeller, eight-seater to Mugumu, a town in the Serengeti, the giant region and animal preserve that encompasses northern Tanzania and part of Kenya. Along with the five of us, a young girl about eight years old was on the flight with her younger brother of about five — both of them thrilled to be on the airplane. According to Leila, they didn’t know it yet, but they were on their way to a remote village to find out that their mother had died of AIDS.
We crammed as much as humanly possible into the next two and a half days.
Waiting for us at the airstrip were a Canadian woman, an American woman, and a Danish man, all of whom volunteered for Right To Play as project coordinators. The idea was that they would gradually pass along their knowledge and eventually turn over the entire operation to local coaches and mentors. These international volunteers would be our program liaisons for the organized activities and events that unfolded. Our other guides and interpreters for the cultural and lifestyle elements, along with Leila, were locals.
For a portion of day two in the Serengeti, we rode in the back of a pickup truck into the bush where one of our guides, Francis, a member of the Kuria tribe, introduced us to “Mr. Cha-cha,” his five wives, and his dozen or so children. Three more of Cha-cha’s kids were buried inside the spiked wooden walls of his compound, victims of malaria and diarrhea. Two more lay in hospital.
