Former Winnipeg Stellars player looks back on basketball team's legacy

That's taken just outside the mission on a return from St. John, New Brunswick. And that's after you won that championship, eh? The second championship, yes. So when you look at that picture, you know, what are some of the memories that come to mind? Well, they are lifelong memories in a sense that that team was, both teams actually were really taking it on and off the floor. Like, we not only played ball together, but we hung out together. and we had lifelong associations. It wasn't just a team thing or a sports thing. It was a social thing. And the families grew up together. There was a United Church in Winnipeg on the corner of Stella and Paulus. But it was also known commonly as Stella Mission. It had a little basement. It was basically more of a dugout. And because the ceiling was so low, They could only get in 9-foot baskets as opposed to a regulation 10-foot basket. And they participated in what they used to call the Sunday School League. That team was a League of Nations. We had, I think everybody, we had Ukrainians, we had Polish, we had Jewish, believe it or not, the United Church. And there was a Swede, there was a Norwegian, there was a Scots, there was me, English. We all came from different backgrounds. We relished it, in fact. Everybody got along so well, and that, as I say, ended up being a lifelong friendship. Something amazing happened in your final series game. Can you take us back to that? Yeah, that was a best-of-five, and in the third game, we were leading two games to zero at that time. And in the third game, the opposition, St. John, because of injuries and falling out, they started to lose players, actually. And of course, what happened was that they were reduced to four players at one time. And so we pulled off a player to compensate for that. That was Martin Terry, our coach. They lost another player, so down to three, and then we pulled our player off. So the actual game ended up with two players from either team on the floor. We sort of modeled ourselves after Mark and Terry and so he was the one who taught us the game, you know. And one of the things that he emphasized was sportsmanship. And, you know, I think the guys all accepted that that was part of the game, part of sports. And, you know, we wanted to exemplify that in our own lives. We were so close-knit, you know, that it was practically our life. You could beat a team by 100 points. What was going through your mind as a player? It didn't disturb anybody. The old joke was, well, we were so far ahead, it wasn't going to matter anyway. But that was the kind of guy he was, you know. And he was the type of guy who influenced us. So that would not be a surprise decision on his part. And nobody, you know, found any fault in it. You know, we just accepted the fact that, sure, we wouldn't want to take advantage of a club like, you know. Dick, when you see this photo, what comes to mind? Well, getting home with the second Canadian championship, for one. And, you know, a lot of pride in the fact that we did that. And doing the way we did that, you know. and so we brought a lot of, I think, publicity for junior basketball in Canada because we not only won, but we won in the right way.