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Christmas is behind us now and I can’t help but think of Eddie Shack, the loud growling voice, the silly smile. This was his time of year. Long after his NHL career ended, he sold Christmas trees. My friend Michael Farber, the former Sports Illustrated star, did a piece for the then great magazine years ago on Toronto as an NBA city. This was long before championships or Masai Ujiri. Farber made the point, half-kidding, half-not, that you’ll know Toronto is a basketball city when you say Shaq and it doesn’t mean Eddie.
Toronto is a basketball city and even in passing, as he did in July at the age of 83, if you say Shack to so many people across Canada, they will see Eddie. Probably always will.
Shack wasn’t the best hockey player to pass away in 2020, just the only one who had hit a hit song written about him and who did commercials for Pop Shoppe.
This year we also said goodbye to the combined excellence of Dale Hawerchuk and Henri Richard, goodbye to Colby Cave and Travis Roy, both way too young, from that great body-checker, Brian Glennie, to the tough guys, Ted Green and Jack McIlhargey, to the future Hall of Famer, general manager Pierre Lacroix, to names from my youth and maybe yours: Bob Nevin, Dean Prentice, Pat Stapleton, junior hockey legends named Larry Mavety and Tommy Webster and the voice and conscience of hockey, Howie Meeker.
Almost everybody I’ve known at different times in their lives have tried to throw a baseball the way Tony Fernandez did. It was part-throw, part-flip, part-underhand, part-sidearm and absolutely original. In Toronto, and maybe across Canada, he was the most imitated Blue Jays player in history. And also one of the most beloved.
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