Category Archives: Male

1900 - 1929, 1970 - 1979, All, Hockey, Male

NORM BURMISTER

Norm Burmister was the only Collingwood born goalkeeper to make the professional ranks. He was born too soon. In this era of expansion, Normie would have no trouble catching a spot in the N.H.L.

He learned his trade on the West End mill ponds and made the Collingwood Junior O.H.A. club at the age of fifteen. One of his team mates was Reg Noble, Collingwood’s contribution to the National Hockey Hall of Fame. Another was Sailor Jim Herberts, one of the most colourful players with Boston, Toronto and Detroit, in the days when colourful hockey players were abundant.

He performed in the nets for several Collingwood junior teams until his career was interrupted by World War 1. He served in the Canadian Army for three years and on his return hitched up with intermediate and senior teams in Welland and Niagara Falls.In 1926 he turned in professional with the New York Americans and was sent to New Haven for seasoning.

His big chance came in 1928 when he was slated to move up into the “Big Time” with the Amerks. But cruel  fate stepped in and deprived Normie of his one big opportunity. Joe Ironstone was a hold-out and refused to come to terms with Big Bill Dyer, the racketeer owner of the New York team. Dyer immediately sent for Burmister, who was in training camp at Niagara Falls. On the day before he was to report, Normie broke his shoulder in a pick-up softball game. He never got the chance again and finished his professional career with New Haven in the Can-American League and Guelph and Stratford in the old Can-Pro League.

While with New Haven, he played with two other Collingwood boys, his brother Roy and Abbie Hughes. Roy and Abbie both made the N.H.L. with New York Americans.

1950 - 1969, 1970 - 1989, 1990 - 1999, 2000 - 2009, 2010 - 2019, 2010 - 2019, All, Golf, Male

MIKE JACKSON

In his competitive golfing career, Mike has atop the leader board for more than 50 golf championships spanning the local, provincial, national and international landscape. Mike has played in national events in all ten Canadian provinces at least once.

Jackson is currently ranked in the upper tier out of more than 700 senior golfers by Golf Week Magazine in the United States.  And as recently as May 2012, he won the Ontario Senior Men’s “Champion of Champions” title by two strokes in Peterborough.

His athletic roots run deep in Collingwood.  He is the son of Ken “Jeep”’ Jackson, a member of the Sports Hall of Fame.  Michael, who played local Junior hockey as a right-winger, tried out for the Guelph CMC’s in 1972. In 1973, he attended the training camp for the Toronto Maple Leafs arranged through local scout Donald ‘Nip’ Spooner.  Mike also played a couple of years of Senior “B” Hockey for the Durham Husky’s winning a provincial championship.

An excellent right-handed golfer as a youth, Jackson was Ontario Best Ball Champion with Hugh Fraser in 1976.  As an amateur, he competed numerous times at the provincial level.  He took part in the 1985 British Amateur at Royal Dornoch in Scotland and was 27th out of 288 golfers before match play.  His medal score was ahead of such greats as Duffy Waldorf, Jose Maria Olazabal and Colin Montgomerie.  He was the 2003 mid-amateur provincial champion (played at Mad River in Stayner) and won the 2010 Ontario Senior Men’s Amateur crown at the Ambassador Golf Club in Windsor.

Locally, Jackson has been the Blue Mountain Golf and Country Club champion an unprecedented 15 times, the club’s Senior champ twice and captured the Scenic Caves Invitational on seven occasions.  As a six-time champion with the Midland Golf and Country Club, he holds the course record of 63, shot in the final round of the club championship in 1979.  He’s a four-time winner of both the Georgian Bay Club championship and Senior Club championship, along with being Match Play champion for three years.

Jackson, a committed community citizen, owns the GM dealership in Collingwood.  A recipient of Rotary’s Paul Harris Fellowship Award, he has been the E-3 Community Living golf tournament chair for many years.  He was a board member for the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame committee from 1988 to 2002.  Jackson has been on the board of the Canadian Auto Institute (CAI) at Georgian College for several years, and was its chairman of the board from 2005 to 2007.

Jackson is appreciative of the support of his family – wife Doreen, son Ryan and daughter Courtney – which has allowed him to venture far and wide in his chosen sport.  He credits fellow Sports Hall of Famers Don Cook and Brian Jeffery for giving him the inspiration to compete in golf.

On October 20, 2012, the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame welcomed Mike Jackson as an enshrined ‘Athlete’ from our sporting community.

1990 - 1999, 2000 - 2009, 2010 - 2019, All, Golf, Male

BRIAN FRENCH

Respected and competitive golf professional Brian French has been a member of Team Ontario five times in Titleist Cup match-play action. His team won the 2010 event played at the Royal Quebec Golf Club in Boischatel. ‘Frenchie’ holds course records locally at Cranberry Resort (66), Mad River (68) and Monterra (66). Among his many achievements was being the leading money winner in the 1989 Ontario Assistants’ Order of Merit.

The winner of more than 10 Ontario professional golf tournaments, French shot a 68 at Deerhurst and a 64 at Tor Hill Golf Club in Regina; both course records. He captured two consecutive championships in the Pro-Am event at the National Golf Club in Woodbridge. He also won the Head Professional T.P.D. Fall Classic at the Barrie Golf and Country Club. In 1986, French won the Saskatchewan Open and was a three-time member of the Willingdon Cup. As part of the Willingdon Cup, he was among the top four amateur golfers in Saskatchewan.

French has shot one double-eagle — on hole #14 at Cranberry — and collected 11 aces in his strong golfing career.

French has been the head golf professional at Mad River Golf Club in Creemore since 1994 and is in his 25th year as an accomplished golf instructor. He was also head pro at Cranberry. He continues to be an avid supporter of developing and promoting popular junior golf programs. Along with being a prolific squash player, he was a class ‘A’ squash referee and a member of the Saskatchewan Squash Association.

While attending Collingwood Collegiate Institute, French was part of the badminton team and continued playing the sport at university. The CCI golf team one year featured French, his brother Tim, and the Jacksons, Mike and Paul.

2000 - 2009, 2010 - 2019, 2010 - 2019, All, Builder, Male, Other

BRIAN BAILEY

Brian Bailey is the wind beneath the wings of the Collingwood Sailing School, which has been recognized by the Canadian Yachting Association and teaches the ropes to
more than 100 youth and adults each year. A Collingwood Yacht Club member since
1973, the Manchester, U.K.-born Bailey raced DEIMOS, an Express 30, for 29
years. The long-time sailor has been the club’s Keel Boat Champion three times. He has been commodore of the local yacht club as well as a member of its board of directors for more than 20 years. In Toronto, he was part of a successful racing crew on a custom C & C 34 which won the Royal Canadian Yacht Club’s;Champion of Champions.

Bailey was the catalyst in the history of the successful Collingwood Sailing School. He
channeled his energy, knowledge and pride into a unique educational opportunity
for budding sailors in the region. Bailey’s early involvement in the sailing school resulted when his son, Kyle, was hired by the former Watts Skiff Sailing School in 2001 as its sole instructor. The following season, he became the volunteer course director helping to drive increased enrolment, improved classroom instruction on the second floor of the Collingwood Terminals warehouse, and organized the repair of a collection of cast-off boats.

The Sailing School, in 2011, had close to 120 students and five instructors. (Almost
all of the instructors hired have been former graduates of the program.) The school’s fleet of 20 boats receives heavy use throughout the summer season. Student volunteers earn valuable experience for their instructor certification and community placement hours for high school graduation requirements. The school offers Canadian Yachting Association White Sail I, II, III, and Bronze IV; V courses at the Collingwood Harbour. The school uses a variety of dinghies from 7.5 feet to 14 feet.

Bailey is an avid skier, working as a Blue Mountain patroller from 1995 to 2004. He was a Mosport racer from 1961 to 1967 with his Sunbeam Alpine car. His first race was in front of a crowd of 50,000 people. He is passionate about all three sports; sailing, skiing and racing; describing how participants carve into turns in each of them. “You feel it”, he said. “You slide through it. If you have done all three, you can relate.”

2000 - 2009, 2010 - 2019, 2010 - 2019, All, Male, Other

ADRIAN VAN DEN HOVEN

Adrian van den Hoven is a sailing master of the Great Lakes. He is the first Canadian to complete solo racing on all five of the lakes, has won his division in all but one of the lakes, and was our country’s first participant in the Super Mac marathon race. For his outstanding efforts, he was awarded the Collingwood Yacht Club’s James Russell Memorial Trophy in 2011 for Meritorious Navigation skills. He’s proven to be one of the best in his racing division.

Seven years after beginning the sport of sailing, van den Hoven set sail on a racing career in 1997. Three years later, he was racing solo and placed first in the 2003 Collingwood Yacht Club Invitational Race. Three out of the five times that he entered the Georgian Bay Sailing Regatta from 2000 to 2008, he placed first in his division and took overall honours in ’00. As part of the crew aboard the 42-foot Benateau ‘Smokum Too’ out of Thornbury, he worked the foredeck handling sails and spinnaker from 2000 to 2011. In 2006, the boat became the first-ever Canadian entry to win overall honours in the Chicago – Mackinac race.

van den Hoven enjoys working out and training, skis alpine and cross-country during the winter months. He works as a full-time employee with Hydro One as a Hydro One Lines Supervisor in Stayner, Ontario.

1950 - 1969, 1970 - 1989, 1980 - 1989, All, Male, Other

ROBERT “BOB” STOREY

Known as “Mr. Bobsleigh” in Canada, Bob Storey was involved in the Olympics for 45+ years as an athlete, official and volunteer.

In the 1960’s, he was a young competitor that trained on rollerblade wheels given
Canada’s lack of any bobsleigh training facility. His first taste of the  Olympics came during the 1976 Innsbruck games as a breakman. Subsequently, he  moved to the front of the sleight piloting Canada I at the World Cup and
Championships until his retirement in 1974. He competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympic Games in the two and four man categories finishing 17th and 19th respectively.

Following his competitive career, Bob began his second career as a representative for the sport of bobsleigh. In this role, he advised national and international sports  bodies and was instrumental in the decision to allow Womens’ bobsleigh and skelton into the 2002 Olympics. He has served as a director and member of the Canadian Olympic Committee that was successful in securing the 1988 Calgary and 2010 Vancouver host bids.

In 1998, he was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Sports Hall of Fame as a builder.

1990 - 1999, 2000 - 2009, 2010 - 2019, Male

DAVID McKECHNIE

It didn’t take McKechnie long to set new benchmarks in swimming as a young member of the Collingwood Clippers. He started swimming at age 9. He holds 60 short-course and long-course club records and five Huronia Regional records. In 1996, he was ranked the nation’s third-fastest 10-year-old swimmer and clocked strong results at the provincials, where he was champion in the 50 and 100 breaststroke.
Ivy League champion swimmer David McKechnie is recognized as one of Cornell University’s all-time best performers, his swimming accomplishments rank among the best results in Ivy League history. He achieved the highest honour a college swimmer can attain as he qualified for the 2007 NCAA Division 1 championship in Minnesota. He placed 24th in the 100 breaststroke. It was a landmark year for the Cornell team, which claimed its first unbeaten dual-meet season in 60 years (10-0) and captured the regular season Ivy League title for the first time in school history. Cornell defeated Princeton and Harvard for the first time in over 20 years. From 2005 to 2007, he was the three-time Ivy League winner in the 100 breaststroke and twice won the league championship in the 200 breaststroke.

He was a member of four championship-winning relays for Cornell at Ivy competition in 2007. He was Cornell’s MVP in 2004-05 and 2006-07 and won the Spirit Award in 2004.
At the 2004 Canadian Olympic trials, McKechnie placed 12th in the 100 and 200 breaststroke. He won the 50 breaststroke championship at the Bell Grand Prix National Meet in Etobicoke in 2006, 3/10th of a second off the national record set by Morgan Knabe. He beat three Canadian Olympians in the process (Mike Brown, Scott Dickens, Matt Huang).

During his years at Cameron Street Public School and Collingwood Collegiate, he was involved in volleyball, basketball, cross-country running, and curling. His 1999-2000 junior volleyball team won the Georgian Bay championship. He also participated in Kids of Steel and Collingwood triathlons.

Twenty-six-year-old McKechnie is employed with Deutsche Bank and lives in Singapore. He says he owes a huge thank you to his local coaches, including Barb Richmire, Cheryl Blay and Todd Funston with the Collingwood Clippers.

1930 - 1949, 1980 - 1989, All, Hockey, Male

CLARENCE “RUSTY” BUTTERS

Rusty Butters was another rugged East Enders who learned his basic hockey on Legatt’s Mill Pond.
His hockey career spanned almost two decades but his long athletic career was not confined to the winter pastime.
Rusty was an exceptionally good football player-good enough to be offered a tryout with the Balmy Beach O.R.F.U. senior team back in 1930. He didn’t accept the offer but instead went to work in the Enterprise-Bulletin. It might have been the biggest mistake of his life. Several big league football coaches were of the opinion that the big outside winger could have made it easily.
His hockey career started with the East End junior and seniors in the old Collingwood Town Hockey League and he graduated to the local O.H.A. junior entry.
For the next fifteen years he made his presence known as a hard hitting, rock ribbed defense player with Collingwood Intermediate and Senior clubs. Rusty and the late Dutch Cain, the King of the body checkers, struck terror into the hearts of opposing forwards for a number of years. Dutch dropped them like stones with his wizardly body checks and the two hundred-pound Rusty crunched then into or over the boards.
Butters had the privilege of playing with such Collingwood hockey greats as Rabbi Fryer, Buck Walton, Jack Burns and Wink Foulis, when this formidable quartette was finishing off their careers in the thirties.
His one and only championship medal came in 1939 when the Collingwood Shipbuilders won the O.H.A. Intermediate “A” title.
Rusty played his last hockey game in Kingston in 1947 when the Shipbuilders were eliminated in the O.H.A. Senior “B” semi-finals round.
At the urging of Red Farrel, he took to refereeing in the O.H.A. and wound up by handling a hundred or so games in the Junior, Intermediate and Senior series before hanging up his skates in 1955.
His track and field career was short but despite his two hundred-pounds stocky stature, Rusty could step the 100 yard sprint in eleven seconds.
A good swimmer and a cracking fine diver, he won the annual Collingwood Aquatic Meet senior diving title three years in a row in the early thirties.
A hard hitting second baseman in the old Collingwood Senior Softball League, hit fifteen home runs in 1931 to help Huck Caesar’s Beavers win the championship. He had a short fling at lacrosse in 1937 on Collingwood’s last lacrosse team.

1900 - 1929, 1930 - 1949, 1970 - 1979, All, Football, Male

HAWLEY “HUCK” WELCH

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Fifty years ago the late Lou Stapleton made this remark when he watched a gangling,
square-jawed fifteen year-old schoolboy trot out on a football field for the first time.

“That kid will be a great football player some day”. Lou couldn’t have made a
more exact prediction because that kid was Hawley “Huck” Welch, who, after a brilliant career with Hamilton and Montreal was inducted into Canada’s Football Hall of Fame in 1966.

He did everything the right way when he performed for the Collingwood Collegiate that season but what impressed Lou most of all was the ease in which Huck sent up those long, smooth sailing spiraling punts with his educated toe.

Huck left Collingwood in his sophomore year and moved off to Hamilton. It did not take Huck very long to get established in that hotbed of football. He helped Delta Collegiate win two successive Ontario Secondary Schools titles and the Tigers picked him up at the end of the 1927 season. He never looked back.

The Tigers won Grey Cups back to back in 1927 and 1928 and the deadly right foot and broken field running of Huck Welch played no small part in the success of that great Tiger team. They still talk about the kicking duels between Welch and Ab Box of the Argos.

One Saturday afternoon Welch kicked three singles and Box kicked two. Hamilton won 3-2. Ted Reeve wrote in his column. “Ab Box kicked the ball clean over Hamilton  Mountain and Huck Welch kicked it back.”

He moved over to the Montreal Winged Wheelers in 1930 when Warren Stevens introduced the forward pass to Canadian football. He helped Montreal win the Grey Cup in 1931 and in 1933 crowned his great football career by winning the Jeff Russell Trophy as the most valuable player in Canadian Football.

He finished his career back in Hamilton in 1937.

Huck served with distinction as an officer in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry in World War 11 and we had the pleasure of watching Huck and an all-star Canadian service football team beat the Americans in London=s White City Stadium in the spring of 1944. As a matter of fact we managed to pick up a bit of that 5 to 1 money the Yanks were tossing around.

1900 - 1929, 1930 - 1949, 1970 - 1979, All, Hockey, Male

JOHN “BUCK” WALTON

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They called him a hockey policeman and there never was a better one than Buck Walton.

Never a fancy skater or a fast one, Buck made up for his lack of speed and finesse with his courage, stick handling and dogged determination.

He played on three Collingwood O.H.A. Intermediate “A” championship teams in 1918, 1919 and 1920 and on the runner-up team in 1921.

When the going got tough and the opposition started carrying the sticks high, the call went out for the “policeman”.

He never spared himself and he never made excuses. If he took a butt end in the corner there was no squawking from the “Buckaroo”

He just lowered his head and hit with everything he had. Buck took many beating but he handed out some pretty good lumps himself. No fast skating forward ever came in on Walton with his head down-at least not after the first time.

I remember the night, fifty-four years ago, when the Buckaroo took a bad on big Dick Simple, the great Midland star of that era. Dick stepped deftly aside and Walton took a Barnum and Bailey dive into the end boards. The crowd groaned as his head and shoulders crunched against the planks and his body slipped down to the ice. The legendary Rabbi Fryer skated over to the fans and called out “Get a dust pan and a broom!” Buck was on his feet in a minute, skated over to the bench, took a long drink of water, or whatever, and joined the affray again. Two minutes later he went from end to end and scored.

Back in 1915, he scored a winning goal in Hamilton that put Collingwood into the O.H.A. semi-finals round. He had been knocked out twice during the game. For twenty years, Buck Walton gave everything he had for Collingwood junior and intermediate teams.

Buck and Rabbi Fryer were lured out of retirement in the thirties and turned out to be bad decision.

In a play-off game between Collingwood and Camp Borden for the Georgian Baygroup title, referee Ernie Wortley fingered buck for five cheap penalties and the Buck lost his cool. He dropped his stick and went for the official, the first time he did that in his life. Fryer came to Buck’s assistance, although he really didn’t=t need it, and both players were suspended indefinitely by the O.H.A.

Two years later, Fryer made application and was re-instated. Buck refused to go hat in hand and said. “Let them keep the O.H.A. it’s only a pink tea party now, anyway. Next thing you know they’ll penalize you for spitting out your own teeth”.

He never was re-instated and I was always sorry about that. I tried to persuade him to apply for re-instatement just so he could retire with a clean slate. It was no dice. Buck was just too proud and that application for re-instatement sounded too much like begging to suit the Buck.