'Famous for a Time' profiles Canadian history makers & record smashers nobody seems to remember anymore

Famous for a Time  Forgotten Giants of Canadian Sport

by Jason Wilson and Richard M. Reid

Canada has more unsung sports heroes than you'd expect. Even with our many territorial, provincial, and national halls of fame, there are world beaters, history makers, record smashers, who just about nobody has even heard of nowadays.

Famous For a Time: Forgotten Giants of Canadian Sport cracks open an aging vault of curiously unknown champions. Jason Wilson and Richard M. Reid are both history professors at the University of Guelph, and while they are celebrating past athletic greatness, they are not sugarcoating any awkward details. This is warts-and-all hagiography, if there is such a thing.

A century and a half ago, lacrosse became Canada's national sport. Before then, the Anishinaabe played Baggataway; Wendat played Kahwendae; Kahnawake played Tewaarathon and Haudenosaunee enjoyed Dehoñtjihgwa'és, the Creator's game. Colonizers co-opted these sports, tweaked the rules, called it lacrosse and then systematically excluded Indigenous players from the game. Lacrosse was neither English, French, nor American, which made it an ideal building block for a new settler-centric Canadian identity.

In 1867 there were 2,000 settlers playing lacrosse in Canada. That number exploded to 20,000 by the 1880s. William George Beers did more than any single person to make it Canada's national sport. He loved lacrosse, and he accomplished great things on the playing field, but he made sure to ban Indigenous players. As with many stories told here, heroes and heels are often one and the same individual.

In 2010, The Indigenous Nationals tried to use Haudenosaunee passports rather than Canadian or American documents to enter England for the World Lacrosse Championships. Canada blocked that symbolic act. Looking ahead to the 2028 Olympics, the Iroquois National Olympic Committee has applied to compete at the Los Angeles Summer Games.

Appropriated by settlers, weaponized in residential schools, lacrosse is now a potent force in the regrowth of Indigenous culture.

Home Run or Hit for 6?

By the 1880s, cricket and baseball were vying for Canadian affection. Baseball delighted the middle class, and even common labourers, but cricket was strictly for those with enough spare money and time to spend five days getting their game on in formal white clothing.

Two stars emerged in the competing sports. Dr. Teddy Ogden made Canadian cricket history at the famous grounds of Lord's in London, at the exact same time that Woodstock, Ont.'s James Edward "Tip" O'Neill was batting his way to the greatest average in early baseball history. O'Neill hit a mind-blowing .492 in 1887, which is only diminished by the fact that walks counted as hits back then. He was the second player to hit for the Triple Crown (best average, most home runs, most RBIs), and he hit for the cycle (hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in a single game) twice in the same season.

While Tip was tearing it up on the baseball diamond, Teddy Ogden was bowling over the Brits. Cricket's rules and scoring are notoriously opaque for many people in this country, but Ogden cemented his fame the day he held the British side to only 83 runs over nine wickets. The Oakville, Ont.-born, Chicago-raised bowler was acclaimed as the greatest North American cricketer of his era.

Who gets the last hoorah? Ogden's feats are largely forgotten today, but the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame still gives the annual Tip O'Neill Award to the best Canadian player.

Bikes may be the cheapest way to get around nowadays, but back in the 1890s, two wheelers were toys that only the rich could afford. Mail order cycles cost $100 at a time when labourers earned around 10 cents per hour. Famous For a Time revisits the history of early cyclist Louise Armaindo, whose big wheel racing exploits deserve their own movie. An even lesser-known biking character was Truro, N.S.'s Karl Creelman, who hopped on a second hand 'Redbird' in 1899 and wobbled off to become the first Canadian to circumnavigate the world on a bicycle.

Sexism ran rampant in early Canadian sports, but it was a particular drag on cycling. Famous for a Time shows how seemingly antiquated attitudes persist into the present. We tut-tut at the boorish blokes of old, and then we're reminded that it was not until 1974 that women were allowed to compete in Canada's national cycling championships. And again we're reminded: Clara Hughes was the first female cyclist to make it into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, and that was in 2010.

Hard Knox

If we must name just one single greatest forgotten Canadian athlete, Walter Knox takes the cake. In the early years of the 20th century, he dominated athletics. Practically every running, jumping, or throwing sport he tried, he owned the record. Knox also went to Scotland and thrashed all comers in the Highland Games. The Listowel, Ont.-born natural was utterly unbeatable for a few seasons, and then went on to a major career as an international athletics coach and champion for the rights of women athletes. So, why is Knox's name not on the tip of every trivia fiend's tongue?

In sports, up to the 1900s, you could either be a genteel amateur, win fame and adulation at the Olympics… or you could be a professional, and make a less-reputable income in match races. But you couldn't be both. Walter Knox wanted it all. As a pro racer, and as a paid coach, he was barred from amateur competition. But he entered every contest he could anyway, using fake names.

When he got caught in 1907, competing as a pro in amateur track meets, Knox was banned for life from the Olympics, and shunned by 'respectable' sports figures.

Knox became a vagabond athlete. He travelled small town North America under assumed identities, betting on himself against the fastest runners he could find. It was a great hustle, because he always won, but it was also risky, because when locals discovered how fast Knox was, they often demanded their money back, and sometimes beat the heck out of him for good measure.

Knox was shifty. He craved adulation. He was heartless in hustling bets. His racist attitudes disturbed his peers, even in that benighted era. But his talent and his ability to train others made him a giant in Canadian track and field. He travelled Ontario tirelessly, showing hundreds of teachers how to become better phys-ed trainers for their own students. He was hired to coach Canadian and British Olympic teams, and he was instrumental in developing the early cohort of Canadian athletes who shone at the Amsterdam Games of 1928. He was no friend to Black athletes, yet he was well ahead of his time in training girls and women to excel. How to appraise such a man?

Famous For a Time zeroes in on the unique psychologies of Canadian breakout stars Percy Williams and Ethel Catherwood, who both dazzled the world at the Amsterdam Olympics. Despite his fantastic ability on the track, Williams hated running, and he was intensely shy, which is a problematic situation for the fastest 100 and 200-metre man on earth. Catherwood enjoyed her high jumping discipline, but was nauseated by photographers' fixation on her prettiness. The two were the stars of the Olympic Games but they were miserable in the spotlight. Awkward, and ultimately tragic as the two were in their day, how much more tortured would they be, living in the age of TikTok?

At least three Black Canadian boxers, all from the Maritimes, made it big in America. George Godfrey left Charlottetown in the 1860s, and headed to Boston to make a living in the ring. He ran up against the racist colour bar that prevented many Black men from taking on white opponents in championship bouts. Despite the segregation, or perhaps as a symptom of it, interracial fights were great business for promoters, and Godfrey's most profitable victories were over white boxers. No championship recognition, but good payouts. From the outset, Godfrey's goal in boxing was to make enough money to set up his wife and kids well. In this, he was an unqualified success. Careful and shrewd with his winnings, when he died in 1901, Godfrey left a multi-property Boston real estate portfolio to his heirs.

Born 1870, in Africville, near Halifax, George Dixon owned the world featherweight title for seven years. He was the 105-pound and bantamweight champion. He was the first fighter to use shadowboxing and the heavy bag, the first North American boxer to go to England and win an international title there. He was famous and rich. Part of his success was because the racist barrier, strictly enforced for heavyweight fighters, was sometimes waived for the lighter weight divisions. Dixon was able to fight and beat white men, and collect the bigger prize money that came with it.

Bouts went on for horrifying lengths back then. One of Dixon's fights in 1890, against white boxer Cal McCarthy, lasted 70 rounds. Almost five hours after it started, a Brooklyn newspaper called it "one of the greatest battles ever fought between featherweights."

Dixon often won by knockouts because, unlike fights in which both men were left standing, there was little a racist referee could do to sway a decision when one fighter was unconscious. Dixon's latter days were sad. Alcoholism got him in the end.

Sam Langford, from Weymouth Falls, N.S., is the best Canadian boxer never to own a championship belt. In 1902 at the age of 16, he won his first pro fight. He won 23 out of 24 fights the next year. At just 17 he took on Joe Gans, the world lightweight champion, and he won, but didn't make the record books because both fighters had weighed in just over the 135-pound limit.

In 1906, Langford fought the legendary Jack Johnson, who was 30 pounds heavier and maybe the most feared fighter in the world at that time. Langford lost, but he knocked Johnson to the canvas twice over their 15 rounds. When Johnson became the world's first Black heavyweight champion, he said no to every rematch with Langford because "Sam is just liable to beat me or make it close, and what's the sense of that for the money we'd draw."

Langford had the admiration of the boxing press of his day and he was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 1955. Other boxing greats in Canada's past include Noah Brusso, aka Tommy Burns, who was derided for NOT being racist. His choice to fight Jack Johnson helped open the door for Black boxers to get a fair shot at the big purses.

Wilson and Reid make clear that fame is fickle, and hero-making is a messy business. Even within the meritocracy of sports, where stats objectively separate the greats from the also-rans, there is no guarantee that excellence on the playing field will translate into lasting celebrity.

Famous For a Time reminds us that few reputations can withstand the scrutiny of later generations. If it feels like the older stories do more of the heavy-lifting in our nation building, it is probably also good to remember that hero-making continues…and so does the shaping of our national image.

Famous For a Time Forgotten Giants of Canadian Sport. Dundurn press 256 pages. b&w images. Paper $26.99