View from the Cheap Seats is kind of an extension of the newsroom. Whenever our three regular reporters, Calvin Daniels, Thom Barker and Randy Brenzen are in the building together, it is frequently a site of heated debate. This week: Which four Saskatchewan athletes would you put in a Mount Rushmore style sculpture.
Multi-sport
I really wanted to include two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash on my Mount Rushmore of Saskatchewan sports just to have a basketball player. Nash lived one year in Regina just after his parents emigrated from South Africa. Ultimately, I decided we could not really lay claim to him, though; he is a Victoria, B.C. boy, if anything.
The other decision was whether this was about the greatest athletes from Saskatchewan or could those who came from elsewhere but played here be included?
That would have given me leave to include George Reed, largely regarded as one of the greatest CFL football players of all time. He is certainly deserving having played his entire professional career with the Roughriders and being instrumental in the 1966 Grey Cup win. Plus, he has made Regina home since he retired. Nevertheless, he comes from the United States and only came to Saskatchewan as an adult.
The Roughriders are so important in Saskatchewan sport, however, that I felt I needed a Rider for the sculpture. Roger Aldag gets that honour. One of the great linemen in the game, he was born in Gull Lake, SK, and played 16 seasons with the green and white including 1987 when the Riders won the Grey Cup for only the second time.
Of course, the mount would not be complete without Gordie Howe from Floral, SK. Hockey is still king in Saskatchewan and Howe is still one of those names that gets mentioned in most best-player-in-history discussions.
If hockey is king, though, curling is the masses. Every little hamlet in the province has a curling rink. In fact, curling is the official sport of the province and few would argue that three time-Scotties, three time-World and Olympic champion Sandra Schmirler from Biggar, SK, does not fit the bill.
The last one was tough with Shaunovan’s women’s hockey phenom Hayley Wickenheiser and Saskatoon’s Olympic champion speed skater Catriona LeMay Doan neck-and-neck.
Wickenheiser actually has twice as many Olympic gold medals, but she did it as part of a team. In 2002, LeMay Doan became the first ever Canadian and only female Canadian to defend an individual Olympic title when she repeated in the 500-metre.
Now I just need to find a mountain to carve.
- Thom Barker
Easy choices
Creating a ‘Mount Rushmore of Saskatchewan Sport’ actually proved easier than I had anticipated.
The first choice was rather obvious in the sense it has to be a hockey player.
In fact, there was the lure of simply going with four hockey people, since Saskatchewan is rather ‘hockey-centric’. It would be easy to just go with Gordie Howe as one of the all-time greats of the sport, then turn to Haley Wickenheiser the best female hockey player so far, Fred Sasakamoose as the first First Nations player to make the National Hockey League, and then finish with Dwight McMillan to represent the coaching fraternity and non-professional hockey, and call it a day.
But the goal we set was ‘Saskatchewan Sport’ so the four need to represent more than hockey.
That said Howe goes up first. If you wonder why Howe out of all the great players to come from Saskatchewan, well you probably are not a big fan of hockey. Howe would make the discussion of who is the best player ever, with Maurice Richard, Mario Lemieux, and Wayne Gretzky jockeying for top spot.
After Howe representing hockey, I had to look to the Saskatchewan Roughriders and football.
Initially, I thought about a Saskatchewan-born ‘Rider but quickly opted for George Reed, arguably the best back in Canadian Football League history, and the best Roughie ever. That he played his entire record-setting CFL career with the Roughriders, then stayed in the province upon his retirement makes him Saskatchewan-enough for me to include him here.
The third sport I settled on was curling, and Sandra Schmirler was the easy choice. As skip of her team she captured three Canadian Curling Championships and three World Curling Championships.
Schmirler also skipped her Canadian team to a gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics, the first year women’s curling was a medal sport.
And it is fitting a gal join the pantheon of the province’s best.
Baseball was my choice for the ‘final four’ of the imagined monument, and that meant Terry Puhl.
Puhl’s career spanned 15 seasons, mostly with the Houston Astros.
His career statistics included a .280 batting average, 62 home runs, 435 RBIs, and 217 stolen bases. He accumulated 1,361 hits in 1,531 games. He was particularly effective in postseason play, batting .372 in 13 games over three series.
As of 2010, Puhl has the ninth-best for lifetime fielding percentage by an outfielder (.993).
And Puhl is a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
I will add I almost went another direction with the final selection, considering an Olympic athlete, which would have been Catriona Ann Le May Doan, a double Olympic champion in the 500 metres of speed skating.
Le May Doan won the Olympic 500 m title at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and repeated the feat at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. At the Nagano Olympics, she also won a bronze on the 1,000 m.
She was World Sprint Champion 1998 and 2002 and World Champion 500 m 1998, 1999, and 2001, and she won a 500 m bronze in 2000. She has also won the 500 m World Cup four times (in 1998, 1999, 2001, and 2003) and the 1,000 m World Cup once in 1998).
On Nov. 22, 1997, Le May Doan became the first woman to break the 38-second barrier for the 500 m, skating 37.90 seconds in Calgary. Before the year was over, she had tied this record once and broken it twice, ending on 37.55 seconds.
When I review Le May Doan’s accomplishments I think I’d opt to go Mount Rushmore one better, and highlight five athletes.
- Calvin Daniels
Different direction
When it comes to Saskatchewan sporting legends the first person to come to mind is, of course, Mr. Hockey himself Gordie Howe.
So when I was asked what four Saskatchewan athletes would be on my ‘Mount Rushmore of Sask Athletes’ Gordie Howe of Floral, SK, was the perfect first choice.
Mr. Hockey is arguably the greatest hockey player in the history of the sport, so it only makes sense that he’s from the ‘Heartland of Hockey’. Howe amassed 1850 points (801 goals, 1049 assists) over 1767 NHL regular season games and is the only player in the history of the league to play in five different decades with his career beginning in 1946 and ending in 1980.
He’s also the inventor of the Gordie Howe Hattrick, which is when a player scores a goal, records an assist and gets in a fight. How Saskatchewan is that?
Second on the mountain is Melville’s Terry Puhl, who had an MLB career from 1977-1991, playing most of the time with the Houston Astros (1977-1990) and finishing up with the Kansas City Royals in 1991.
An MLB All-Star in his second season, Puhl hit .280 over his career driving in 435 runs and mashing 62 homeruns while manning the outfield daily.
To this day Puhl continues to help the Canadian baseball community opening the doors of the University of Houston-Victoria (where he coaches) to Canadian players while also managing the Canadian national baseball team.
The third name that comes to mind when we’re taliking of Mount Rushmore worthy athletes is the 6’3”, 270-pound former lineman-turned-politician, Saskatoon’s Gene Makowsky.
Makowsky spent his entire CFL career with his beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders where he played in four Grey Cup games and a Rider record 284 CFL games. He was also named to the CFL All-Star game five times and was a CFL West All-Star seven times.
After football he decided to continue to try and better the province by becoming a member of the Saskatchewan Party and was elected as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan in 2011.
The fourth and final member of my quartet of Saskatchewan sports greats is yet another football player. However he’s not a player that has played for the Riders.
Instead it’s a man who was born in wee little Rhein, SK.
Arnie Weinmaster played just six years of professional football for the NFL and AAFC (All-American Football Conference) but in that time he impressed everyone.
Weinmaster went to four Pro Bowls with the New York Giants and was a six-time All-Pro from 1948-1953.
He was also on the first ever BC Lions team in 1954 and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He certainly deserves to be immortalized in stone with the other four sports heroes of the province.
- Randy Brenzen
